The Castle. By Franz Kafka. Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir, London: Martin Secker. Pp.xii. 452, 7s. 6d. net.
Kafka has not till now been offered to English readers. He died of consumption five years ago at the age of 42, leaving various unfinished MSS. behind him, which he desired his executor to destroy. ╥The Castle╙ was one of them. It is an allegorical novel, in which, however, imagination and reality are too closely crossed that there is hardly a sentence one may not suspect of two intentions. The castle is ╥Heaven╙ (i.e., the mixture of human fears and hopes and prejudices normally covered by that term, with any residual objectivity which may also turn out to belong to it); and this castle is inhabited by mysterious ╥gentlemen,╙ our divinities; ╥K,╙ bound for the castle, arrives in its dependent village and claims to have been sent for as a land surveyor, but the representatives of ╥Heaven╙ know nothing of him. Neither welcomed nor dismissed, he has a series of encounters with the sly, suspicious feudal peasantry, all masterfully told, and by processes of ambiguous deduction from their evasions and silences advances towards a goal assumed to be worth attaining, but for reasons as ambiguous as the processes of his advance. Every page is a puzzle, and the more tantalising because the ostensible narration, wherever it wanders, lifts detail after detail into brilliant light. Yet a puzzle should perhaps have more leverage to it, a more patent lure. It is useless ╥K╒s╙ wanting to get to the castle unless the reader wants to get there too; the basis of sympathy between them is tenuous, and ╥K╒s╙ manners do not increase it. After all, an allegory of disillusionment has the disadvantage of having been anticipated by life; we hardly need to be enticed that way; the downward drag is only too powerful already.
