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makes the best of superficiality, pretending more plausibly than those
who actually do, to understand what it does not and causing his readers
to feel that they understand the most precisely when they understand
the least. The task of such a talent is not to illuminate our understanding
and our experience but to enlighten our public emotions, to post us on
the appropriate reactions of the day; it provides us with an etiquette
for current events.
Koestler's way of subduing the difficult and rather impersonal ma–
terial of contemporary politics is to see moral dilemmas everywhere, just
as Malraux used to see Gidean philosophico-aesthetic problems. But one
of the most truly problematical aspects of modern politics is precisely that
it offers so little opportunity for moral choices and independent action–
in other words, so little opportunity for fiction on a high level. He who
today wants to write political novels must renounce understanding and
be
ready to tell or condone the lies of incompleteness. Thus, in Koestler's
case as much violence is done to the truth as to fiction.
The very interest of
Thieves in the Night
as a vivid travel book and
as a quick introduction to Palestine politics and society-all of which it
is-flows from its oversimplifications.
If
it were less superficial it would
be less interesting. For the moment I am willing to exchange, for the sole
sake of reading matter, the true complexities of the situation for Koestler's
contrapuntal effects: the beauty of the decaying Arab villages versus the
healthy but ugly utilitarianism of the J ewish settlements; the noisy, neu–
rotic weakness of the European J ew versus the brawn and courage of
the Palestinian "Hebrew"; the interestingness, on the other hand, of
Einstein, Marx and Freud versus the dull loutishness of the new Tarzans
of the communal settlements; the dignity of resistance versus the humi–
liation of passiveness and caution-and so on.
It is in
1939,
the period just before and after the issuance of the
British White Paper restricting Jewish immigration and land-purchases
in Palestine. The hero, Joseph is a half-Jewish, half-Anglo-Saxon pioneer
on a collective farm who has identified himself with the J ews because of
a painful, melodramatic, and cheaply far-fetched incident in his past.
Through his and others' eyes we get quick glimpses into every corner of
tl1e Palestinian scene: the Arabs, the British, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, an
American journalist, a high-born expatriate of Mayfair, a survivor of
the Socialist uprising in Vienna, a survivor of the Gestapo with a "Thing
to Forget"-and so on. And it is all done with a great deal of journalistic
skill, notwithstanding--or perhaps just because-almost every figure is
lay and every situation stock. Since we know so little about Palestine in
the flesh it is better, no doubt, to drape that flesh in all its freshness and
novelty on a familiar armature taken straight from a run-down novelists'
costumes and furnishings firm.
The novel comes to a climax when Joseph joins up with a Jewish
terrorist organization (modeled, apparently, on the Irgun Zvai Leumi,
