The Black Room

by Colin Wilson

Au hasard d'une rencontre avec des amis londoniens, Christopher Butler, musicien et compositeur, accepte une étrange proposition : se rendre en Écosse pour participer à un projet ultrasecret. Des scientifiques y expérimentent une installation appelée " Chambre noire ", où des sujets volontaires sont plongés dans une obscurité complète et un silence absolu. Il s'agit de savoir combien de temps ils pourront supporter psychologiquement ces conditions d'isolement extrême.

Très vite, Butler comprend que ce projet intéresse divers services de renseignement, dont la CIA – nous sommes en pleine guerre froide –, ainsi qu'une mystérieuse organisation, la Station K. Afin d'en savoir plus sur celle-ci, il gagne la Tchécoslovaquie.

L'aventure ne fait que commencer - ainsi que les dangers, notamment celui d'être pris pour un espion à la solde de la CIA par la police secrète tchèque –, et il ira de découverte en découverte, jusqu'à la révélation finale dans un mystérieux monastère.

Un roman d'espionnage qui transcende le genre, riche en péripéties, où Colin Wilson poursuit sa recherche de la signification de la vie.

Genres: Fiction

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.

Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.

Reviews

[John M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically, this is an espionage story on the surface but the real premise is one of Wilson's primary theories that it requires a concentrated effort to maintain a state of heightened awareness and that this consciousness is a 'muscle' that can be trained. In this book, it is 'the black room';an experiment in sensory deprivation that provides the opportunity to focus the will independent of external stimuli and strengthen that muscle.
The British intelligence (MI5) see this as an opportunity to train potential agents to resist the 'brainwashing' techniques of a mysterious organization known as Section K. The protagonist, Kit Butler (a minor character in 'the Sex Diary of a Metaphysician'), approaches this situation very reluctantly, being much more interested in exploring the limits of human consciousness than in any political agenda.
The book ends on an ambiguous note, with Butler having a sort of value experience or epiphany during a moment of great tension. I don't know if Wilson planned a sequel but the ending is rather abrupt.
When reading Wilson's fiction, one has to keep in mind that he was expounding his own unique theories and that these stories, while being high entertainment, are primarily vehicles for such.
Much of what Wilson enthuses about may seem slightly irrelevant or overly mystical to more staid minds but I am always left with a feeling of standing on the edge of something or of being handed a key to unlocking my potential upon finishing one of his books.
I wouldn't rate 'the Black Room' as highly as, say, 'the Philosopher's Stone', but it is definitely concerned with the same theme: that of achieving at will a higher form of consciousness.

[Zantaeus Glom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colin Wilson's 'The Black Room' is a bravura cold war spy thriller greatly enlivened by his own idiosyncratic philosophical musings. Kit Butler, our hugely libidinous, music composing hero is somehow able to remain cogent inside the sense depriving 'Black Room' for far longer periods of time that is considered 'normal', and therefore he is sexually manipulated into joining a covert operation in order to ostensibly expose the far-reaching machinations of the preternaturally secretive Station K. Station K is forcefully managed by the toweringly enigmatic figure of Staufmann, a physical giant of a mental superman whose terribly oblique political machinations appear to have long-infiltrated the murky enclaves of many, if not all the world's espionage organizations; thereby allowing him to secretively inculcate the strange, Gnostic tenets of his own indomitable will! And just like some alien-thinking Machiavellian god, Staufmann’s manipulating reach seems omnipresent.

Once Kit has finally arrived in Wilson’s beautifully imagined Prague, he soon becomes deeply intertwined within the densely obfuscating coils of the impossibly mysterious Station K, and it is at this precise juncture wherein the didactic novel exposes the good stuff. Colin Wilson's tyro imagination really takes flight as he so lucidly describes the tenebrous, cloistered realm of ‘Station K’ and all of its no less singular acolytes. I was quite literally unable to stop myself from reading all this in one sitting; being strongly beguiled by this sinuously written, boys own narrative, right until the expressly abrupt ending. (A really, REALLY abrupt ending which arrives with all the brusque fatality of a gunshot to the head!)

'Never think of yourself as a victim. It gets into your subconscious, and you become accident-prone.'
'That taught me the first lesson: that man is as strong as his sense of purpose - no more, no less.
'Music opens to man an unknown region, a world that has nothing in common with the world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind all ordinary feeling to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing'

Granted, it has become somewhat of a cliché, but when describing the myriad merits of ‘The Black Room’; it must be once more repeated that the book will have far greater appeal to those who already appreciate his work, than to those who are thus far indifferent to it. Colin Wilson’s deliriously impassioned, deliciously subversive thoughts upon the neutered consciousness of man are clearly expressed here, and I also enjoyed the absurdly contrived convolutions of his exhilarating pot-boiler plot that he used to frame his luminous ideas. That said, and without wishing to confuse the matter, if any broad-minded readers have yet to experience Colin Wilson’s mighty canon, no bawdy pun intended, (okay, maybe a little one: Ooeer missus!) I sincerely believe that ‘The Black Room’ may well be a better primer than his equally pulpy ‘Space Vampires’; and if ‘The Black Room’ piqued said reader’s interest; can I humbly suggest that he/she please move onto his transcendental masterpiece ‘The Mind Parasites’ with the greatest alacrity! To my mind, parasitically infested, or not, Colin Wilson is one of Great Britain’s most valuable thinkers, and one who cleverly utilizes the tropes of the pulpiest fictions to better penetrate the quiescent nodes of the reader’s generously boggled mind.

It is with this final pearl of Wilson's opalescent wisdom that I feel more succinctly encapsulates the book's psychical modus operandi than I ever could: 'Freedom is mental intensity. Most men are incapable of mental intensity, so most men can never be free'.

('Freedom is mental intensity!!!!!' I#expletive# love that!)

[Richard Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brief review is a place holder. I am rereading The Black Room by Colin Wilson. I had, frankly, forgotten I'd read this book, and had in fact passed it on to a friend many years ago. In retrospect, I found this book, along with two others of Colin Wilson's novels to be engaging and powerful. Those books are "The Mind Paracites", my favorite of his works, and "The Space Vampires" a book which has the misfortune of a very bad title, but which still remains an excellent read. His other fiction (that I recall) is a series of books about a place called "Spider World", and while they may also be very good, and I do own them, I've had a hard time getting into them.

I will do an in-depth review of The Black Room as time permits after finishing the rereading.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

lt took me thirty years to find this book again. lt had been given to me as a hard back decades ago, it was second hand, l got a quarter into the book, and found two pages torn out, so l just tossed it.
now l have found that that book is now worth a lot lol oh well shit happens.
october l found it again as a softback, and have just started reading it once again. l am excited that l finally found the book again.
l also have two others that l will review when l start or when l have read them.
........
Book now read. lm a little disappointed.
the black room is an interesting concept, and this is what l wanted to learn about.
l recieved a few views from the story, for that l am grateful, but the story just went on and on.
lt ended abruptly leaving me wondering.
lm wondering if there is a sequel to explain the dead stop at the end.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's as much a "spy novel" as, say, "17 Moments of Spring," with a different premise, of course. The general theme, again, is raising human awareness, by whatever it takes, and, again, there is next to none humanitarian belief in the success of the enterprise. No supermen either. Generally, it's more of a masturbation fantasy about Very Dangerous Intellectuals. But entertaining, especially when the novel characters mention "Konsomol" mafia in the soviet Politburo, and hint that Suslov was a Nazi mole.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mark E. Smith listed this as one of his favorite books at one point, so I read it. It's a good read. I expected it to be darker and perhaps weirder, but in the end, I'm glad it wasn't. It is certainly dated, as a psychological thriller.

[Paul Barnes · Rating 1 out of 5]

[Sphere Books Limited] (1979). SB. 298 Pages. Purchased from ‘johnshire’.

Colin Wilson is no John Le Carre.

This is a protracted, trash spy thriller, apparently contrived as a vehicle for his own interminable ramblings: a clumsy, repetitive conflation of cribbed thoughts.

Female characters are typically flimsy, relegated to the role of sexual props. There’s a cartoonish element to the whole gallery. Little rings true - absurd event sequences and implausible dialogue.

An overlong, tacky, banal scrapheap. As is often the case with this writer; we’re ultimately served up no more than a pretentious, bad-taste hack job.

The typeface is way too small.

[Stevedutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having not read a Wilson book for a couple of years this is now the third I’ve read this year. In fact, this is a re-read, since I first read The Black Room shortly after it was first published in the early seventies. Coming back to it after so long I was struck by how dated it seemed: then the Cold War was still ‘hot’ and the climate of ‘free love’ was redolent of the relatively recent ‘summer of love’. However, for me, this kind of quaintness adds to its charm and Wilson is rarely less than engaging. Basically, the book amounts to a repackaging of his main concern; i.e. that humans do not achieve anything close to their full potential.

The context for all of this is basically a spy story featuring the kind of outlandish cold war preoccupations of the CIA and KGB such as remote viewing and sensory deprivation. Wilson’s protagonist is Kit Butler, a middling English composer who, due mainly to the charms of a couple of female twins, allows himself to become one of a group of guinea pigs experimented upon at a remote government laboratory somewhere in the wilds of Scotland. He proves to be an outstanding ‘subject’. Seemingly, therefore, against his will, which is somewhat ironic, he is persuaded to act as a kind of Trojan horse so that MI5 can penetrate a non-aligned espionage group known as Station K.

Despite its quaintness and the fact that the ending is far too abrupt it’s interesting, informative and engaging and will definitely appeal to those of Wilson’s fans who have not yet had the pleasure.