The Age of Longing: A Novel

x, 362 pp. Paris in the mid-fifties. The City of Light in the immediate future is tense under the threat of totalitarian aggression. The diplomatic representatives of the "Commonwealth of Freedomloving People" righteously protest their peaceful intentions, but few are deceived. The threat is imminent, and thinking men know what the consequences will be when it materializes. But only a handful are prepared to do battle: the rest are paralysed by fear, pathological hatred, hopelessness, cynicism, or fatuous optimism. ...Koestler shows with terrifying clarity how a man can sublimate his humanity to the inhumanity of his uncritical beliefs; and at the same time he manages to make his aberrations understandable."