Departure and Arrival

I remember Darkness at Noon being strewn with quite dense paragraphs, but I also remember quite liking it, so I thought I'd read Arrival and Departure. Camus and Koestler were quite good friends, Koestler playing a small role in the feud that would divide Camus and Sartre. He criticized the Communist regime in post-war France, something which didn't go down too well.

I'm not sure quite what to take from Arrival and Departure. It seems more like a literary expedition rather than a novel one might put forward. A soldier has escaped capture and made it to Neutralia. A place that fascism is slowly creeping into, but where embassies exist for most countries, so he sets about trying to re-enlist. There are a great many admin hurdles (reminds me somewhat of Kafka's The Castle) and it seems like his country would rather he defected than let someone back in who has already been tortured by the enemy.

A lover he meets on Neutralia finally receives permission to relocate to America, she asks the protagonist to follow her, to which he agrees. Shortly after her departure, however, his leg stops moving. The problem is deemed to be psychological (a relatively new concept at that time I guess) and he is counseled to talk about the horrors of war he has seen, including a particularly awful experience of traveling in multi-purpose transports, which have carriages for captured slave-workers, and also ones full of Jews who are gased at some point before their carriage is detached from the train. Perhaps this is one of the first books that taps into the idea of this type of therapy - trying to reveal repressed memories and emotions. It seems to show only a basic understanding of this method although I'm not sure where psychology was at during this time.

In the end, and I guess this is the sentiment to be taken from the book, the soldier is tempted to start working (just doing little bits) for the enemy, before finally declaring that he will not - and that even if his own side is committing atrocities, and even if their philosophy does not hold up (we're presuming some type of communism), then he still must fight against the enemy because what he's fighting against is not the philosophy of the enemy but rather the acts of violence and massacre such as are committed on the multi-purpose transports.