Like Mac, Jim Nolan is a psychologist of mass violence. He even offers to reopen his wound so that his blood will provide a stimulus for the group to attack the strikebreakers. When the strikers are about to mob one strike leader who has bloodied another, he diverts them from this assault to the one he desires. There are other instances in which a specific theory of the effects of violence is used for political purposes. Just as Dostoyevsky’s Pyotr Verhovensky has his circle kill Shatov to cement them together, so Hemingway’s Pablo had made his townsmen communal executioners of the Fascists: “To save bullets,” explains Pilar, “and so that each man should have his share in the responsibility.” The basic attitudes behind mass political phenomena are analyzed by some of Koestler’s major characters. Both Jules Commanche and Julien Dellatre discuss the ills of France and Western man in general. Their conclusions are very similar to Rubashov’s critique of Communist policy. Finally Koestler himself sums up this consistent point of view when he explains the cause of Hydie’s constant and unsuccessful search in _The Age of Longing_: “the place of God had become vacant, and there was a draft blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.” chapter six The Novelist as Analyst of Individual Political Behavior Repulsed by his party in his attempt to return to politics after the first World War, Edward Wilcher, in _To Be a Pilgrim_, turns to writing. He tells his brother: No one has written a real political novel--giving the real feel of politics. The French try to be funny or clever, and the English are too moral and abstract. You don’t get the sense of real politics, of people feeling the way: of moles digging frantically about to dodge some unknown noise overhead; of worms all diving down simultaneously because of some change in the weather; or rising up gaily again because some scientific gardener has spread the right poison mixture; you don’t get the sense of limitation and confusion, of walking on a slack wire over an unseen gulf by a succession of lightning flashes. Then the ambitious side is always done so badly. Plenty of men in politics have no political ambition; they want to defend something, to get some reform--it’s as simple as that. But even then they are simple people, too, and it is the simple men who complicate the situation. Yes, a real political novel would be worth doing. I should like to do for politics what Tolstoy has done for war--show what a muddle and confusion it is, and that it must always be a muddle and confusion where good men are wasted and destroyed simply by luck as by a chance bullet.