Kallocain is a lesser-known dystopian novel written during a period which was inspirational for writers of this genre. As the blurb on the back of my copy points out, it was published midway between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Karin Boye had the artistic advantage over Huxley of witnessing the continued rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s and the repressive Soviet system under Stalin, before she wrote her novel, which allowed millions of peasants to die of starvation and neutralised rivals with political show trials. Like her predecessor, Boye’s novel is set in a futuristic World State, its period indeterminate, in which a drug is introduced for social control. But in Huxley’s world Soma is taken recreationally as a means to relax and break down inhibitions. Sexual access to one’s peers is assumed and the drug helps smooth over any misgivings anyone might have. In Kallocain, a drug is developed by Leo Kall, a chemist living in Chemistry City No.4, which will unerringly force people to tell the truth. The difference between the drugs is apparent. Huxley’s drug lulls its population into complaisant indulgence and pleasure while Kallocain’s efficacy – named after its inventor – lies in its ability to deprive its subjects of the privacy of their thoughts: in effect, giving the State the power to police and control them entirely.

In this way the story seems to anticipate Orwell’s novel as much as it builds upon Huxley’s. Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania parodies aspects of Soviet Russia. In Oceania newspaper stories are rewritten and photographs are doctored to change history and reality. Whatever the party says is the truth, even if it contradicts itself. And submissive adherence to party ideology is not enough. Winston Smith is tortured and broken until he truly believes the tenets of Big Brother. It’s that level of control that Kallocain promises.

But Boye’s World State hasn’t quite progressed as far as Oceania yet, and the opening of the novel suggests that it may never happen, at least in World State. Others States are interested in the drug. Leo Kall is now a prisoner of a rival State interested in Kallocain and has been incarcerated for the last twenty years. His narrative, written when he is supposed to be doing other work for his enemies, tells of the events leading to his capture and imprisonment: his unhappy marriage; his jealousy of a presumed sexual rival, Rissen, whom he believed had been having an affair with his wife, Linda; his own suspect thoughts which attracted the attention of the Ministry of Propaganda; and his development of Kallocain, which he hoped would win the approval of the State once again.

Boye travelled to the Soviet Union in 1928 and became disillusioned with its promises, and was horrified by the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of the Second World War. Presumably the two states represented in Kallocain are inspired by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, even though the novel’s postscript gives the second State, the ‘Universal State’, an Asian flavour. The expected submission of the individual to the State has echoes in both the ideology of Soviet Russia and Germany of that time, although World State feels more Soviet than German. The individual is wholly subservient to the State. Even individual relationships and trust between people is considered a potential threat to the State. “If there were reason for trust between people,” Kall tells Police Chief Karrek, “no State would have arisen. The sacred and necessary foundation of the State’s existence is our mutual and well-founded mistrust of each other. Those who cast suspicion on that foundation cast suspicion on the State.” Adherents of this ideology imagine the development of the State in evolutionary terms: a progression from “individualism to collectivism” and “isolation to community”. In this sense, individuality is not so much suppressed as absorbed into the State apparatus, which is also characterised biologically as a “gigantic and sacred organism in which the individual was merely a cell.” The logical progression of this thinking is to understand the State’s actions and an individual’s actions in service to the State as natural. When Kall develops the drug that will hand control of the minds of the State’s subjects over to it he imagines himself to be a vaccine, freeing “the State’s body from all the sick poison the thought criminals had implanted there.” And when Kall is given the means to eradicate a rival in whom he sees his own wavering thoughts reflected, he applies the same organic metaphor to his own moral danger: by eliminating his rival Kall will be a “real fellow soldier again, a happy, healthy cell in the organism of the State.” As a body the State is more important than any cell/individual.

The notion of “thought criminals” also seems prophetic. Nine years after Kallocain Orwell would coin the term ‘Thought Crime’: a term suggesting that the totalitarian State owned the individual entirely, right down to their private thoughts and feelings. It’s a conclusion which has also been reached with the development of Kallocain and is expressed in an argument Kall makes to his wife, Linda:

Words and actions are born of thoughts and feelings. Then how should thoughts and felings be the private concern of the individual? Does not the whole of the fellow soldier belong to the State? To whom would his thoughts and feelings belong, if not to the State? It’s merely that until now it has not been possible to control them – but now the drug has been discovered.

The logial conclusion of Kallocain is a world in which traditional trials can be eliminated, employees can be vetted with absolute certainty and subjects can be denounced. A newspaper article announces “THOUGHTS CAN BE PUNISHED” after the introduction of a new law written specifically to take advantage of the drug’s power. But Boye’s portrayal isn’t as crushing as Orwell’s. Our perspective remains with Leo Kall and his own psychological struggle between an enlightened view of humanity and the attractions of certainty his drug apparently offers. We see him as an uncertain and vacillating figure, nervous of his place within the political framework, who finds himself advocating for individualism in front of crowds in unguarded moments, and then trying to rationalise his lapses through the imagined agency of others. Kall’s insecurity seems to demonstrate Rissen’s belief that greater repression leads to greater instability. The effect of the new law leads to more denunciations, and even Kall sees the potential for deleterious effects upon the State. Of the denunciations encouraged by the experiments to test Kallocain, Kall remarks:

… it struck me that so many of the denunciations were false or at any rate unnecessary. Almost each and every one of the tested subjects stumbled out crushed and broken … and yet what was revealed was often of such a laughably trivial nature … that one began to wonder if the apparatus was worth its price.

Had Karin Boye lived longer and written Kallocain later, it may have been a different novel if she had learned the full depravities of Nazism and the Death Camps. But Boye committed suicide in the April of 1941. Her personal story is interesting to note when reading Kallocain, her last novel. Apart from the political reflections in the novel it is a more personal work than Orwell’s. Boye struggled with her own sexuality and underwent psychoanalysis in 1932 and 1933. She accepted that she was homosexual and began a relationship with another woman, Margot Handel, after divorcing her husband, and she remained in that relationship until her death. It’s interesting to speculate about the effect that the experience of psychoanalysis may have had upon Boye and her writing of this novel. Because one of the most powerful moments does not involve the State, but comes when Kall administers Kallocain to his wife, thinking he might gain control of her by knowing the secrets of her mind. Her honest response is a powerful indictment against male power, its application against women, and the way that patriarchal power structures devalue women politically. “You have broken me open like a tin can, by force”, she accuses Kall. When I read that it sounded to me like personal bitterness flowing directly from Karin Boye. Kall’s invasiveness is traumatising, destructive and ill-fated. Here the novel reveals an irony about power: that its severe application engenders resistance; that at the heart of totalitarianism is the fragility of uncertainty and a blindness to its own weaknesses. Kall’s uninhibited impulses, we see, lie naturally with a conception of humanity defined by dissidents of World State: as one free of control and caring for the individual. But in the totalitarian environment of World State, humanity isn’t defined this way and Kall tries to convince himself that he is okay with this. Kadidja Kappori, a woman who is caught up in the experiments with Kallocain, is lead to believe her husband has betrayed the State and denounces him, and now he wants to leave her. For Kadidja, “He was no longer human” while ever she suspected him. When she is disabused of her suspicions she cannot understand why her husband wishes to leave her: that she has broken a bond between them; that she understands his humanity only within the parameters of her State indoctrination. Despite his wavering in the novel, Kall sides with Kadidja.

Kallocain is a novel full of ideas, and it consistently prosecutes its case. The ending, landing in the same place as the novel begins with Kall imprisoned by a foreign power, may seem to offer hope, but the Universal State seems just as much an ideologically closed box as the World State, and just as determined to exploit Kallocain in the future. Totalitarian power, per se, is frightening, not merely who employs it. And in response to this the novel offers little hope. Against the State stands only a belief in human nature, trust, and the freedom from organisation and coercion. But the State is organised, and the prophet who inspires the dissidents, Reor, is said to have determinedly trusted in the humanity of others and left his doors unlocked. He was murdered by a robber.

Kallocain is an interesting book to read if you are interested in the development of this genre through the first part of last century, or desire to reflect upon the impulses of humanity and power.