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Charles Osbourne, The Sunday Telegraph
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It begins almost as travel writing, with Koestler and his girlfriend lazing around in pleasantly bohemian fashion on the Riviera, the increasing tension in 1939 Europe seemingly a million miles away. But back in Paris, Koestler is arrested by the increasingly paranoid French authorities and interned at Le Vernet along with a ragbag collection of other foreigners. Mostly leftists, intellectuals and Jews, they include Spanish Civil War veterans, Russian émigrés, German refugees and sundry unlucky Eastern European immigrants and petty criminals. His description of the people and the hardships encountered during his three months of internment with the dregs of the European Left stands comparison with any other prison camp autobiography, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. These are the beaten and bloody remnants of the once heroic International Brigades, betrayed by Stalin, by France and by each other -the titular Scum of the Earth.
The rest of the book follows Koestler through his release, his return to Paris, his attempts to leave for England legitimately, and his final chaotic escape through a disintegrating France. Again, the observations on the mentality of the French people and the French state faced with Hitler are incredibly acute and clear-eyed. However the most vivid feeling you take from the book is the hysterical fear, despair and disgust that grows on Koestler as the Nazis advance.
I'd recommend this book to everybody . It should be read anyone interested in 1930s radicalism and it's destruction on the anvil of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and by anyone interested in how and why France was invaded in 6 weeks in 1940. But it has strong draws on other levels as well. It deals fascinatingly with Koestler's favoured theme of Ends vs. Means, and with the psychology of political prisoners, but then it is also a skewed travelogue of France as Koestler staggers round the South West disguised as a Swiss Foreign Legionnaire trying to dodge the Panzers.
Koestler's reputation as a man has (rightly) taken a battering after David Cesarani's recent biography but nonetheless this is a very fine book. I would say it is the equal of his great novel, Darkness at Noon - it deals with similar themes but in a more direct, conversational way. Like his friend George Orwell, Koestler had the ability to write about politics with enormous common-sense and without catcalling or bandying jargon around. He refuses to be a propagandist and he gives all the people and points of view he encounters a fair and compassionate hearing, however blinkered, prejudiced or stupid they may be.
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