Boots stamping on human faces crop up time and time again in Bowie songs, from the early “We Are Hungry Men” to “1984,” “The Next Day,” and “Scream like a Baby.” This last song, from 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), is narrated by a gay pacifist who, with his friend Sam, has been blindfolded, shackled, and taken away to be pumped full of drugs until he learns to integrate with society on the government’s terms.
There are shades here of A Clockwork Orange and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but also of Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s chilling critique of totalitarianism set in a version of Stalinist Russia around the time of the Moscow show trials, when many prominent Old Bolsheviks were arrested on ludicrous charges, found guilty of treason, and either imprisoned or executed.
Born in Budapest in 1905, Koestler based the novel on his own experience of being imprisoned first by Franco during the Spanish Civil War; then in France in an internment camp; then in Pentonville as an illegal immigrant once he had escaped to England. The manuscript, which Koestler wrote in German while living in France, had to be smuggled across the Channel by his partner, sculptress Daphne Hardy. The novel’s success meant he no longer had to resort to the sort of desperate moneymaking strategies he had employed earlier, such as writing a sex encyclopedia under the pseudonym Dr. Costler.
From the start, the tone of the novel is bleakly ironic as main protagonist Rubashov is arrested, tortured, and tried for treason by the regime he helped to create—“the Party,” as everyone calls it, headed by “Number One” (Stalin), whose color picture hung over every bed and sideboard in the land. He is the prototype for Big Brother, another of the spirits of greed and lords of theft Bowie refers to in “If You Can See Me.” (Crusade, tyrant, and domination were the three words Bowie chose to describe that song.)
Koestler keeps us close to Rubashov. We experience his imprisonment as he does, his disappointment as he is denied food, his fearful excitement as he communicates with his neighbor by tapping on the wall, his memories of his former career as a member of the party elite. In the end, Rubashov confesses because he genuinely believes himself to be a traitor and is shot in the back of the neck.
Where Darkness at Noon differs from Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it’s more of a novel of ideas. As Orwell himself observed, it’s about the intellectual struggle between three men—Rubashov and the two officers dealing with his case: Ivanov, another Old Bolshevik, who knows Rubashov is innocent but also that this is irrelevant; and the youthful, ambitious believer Gletkin, compared to a bird of prey pecking at its victim.