Page:Krakatit, review in The Guardian.jpg



In “Krakatit” Capek has succeeded in doing what he set himself to accomplish. His romance is daring and ingenious, built on a novel idea and carried out with surprising zest and force. Prokop, the plebeian hero, a scientist concentrated on his astonishing discoveries about the disintegration of matter, is the first man to “overcome the coefficient of compressibility.” He has learned how to “accelerate the speed of detonation,” which, after a certain speed, increases the power of explosion terrifically. He has invented Krakatit, a few ounces of which, sprinkled about, can blow up whole towns or whole armies. As Daimon the Anarchist puts it, “with Krakatit and the wireless station you can checkmate the world. Do you want to blow it up? You can. Do you want to make it happy by forcing upon it continual peace, God, a new order, a revolution? Why not? You’ve only to begin.” But Prokop doesn’t want to do any of these things. On the contrary, he becomes terrified not by his discoveries but by the use men will make of them, and he refuses to surrender the secret of his formula to the rival emissaries of States, militarists, great capitalists, and others who, having got wind of it, come swarming round him. Prokop is a dogged, determined man, but innocent of worldly wiles, and one of the many clever things in the book is the way his honest figure shows up against the machinations of certain “highly born” personages and their agents, who kidnap him and keep him prisoner in the Castle of Balttin. Here a Princess, not beautiful but fascinating none the less, whose character Prokop discovers is “virginal, unfeeling, libidinous, proud, and capable of violent anger—inflammable as tinder—and wicked,” falls violently in love with him, and the most entertaining portion of the story is concerned with Prokop’s fruitless efforts to withstand her seductions. The descriptions of life in the Castle, where Prokop performs the most astounding feats, are written with brilliant verve, and one finds it all the more grateful since they follow the erratic and bizarre opening scenes in which Prokop’s misadventures with Krakatit and his nightmarish energy are conveyed in not a little of the “frightful jargon of scientific terminology.” Throughout the novel, however, Capek intermixes very skilfully the twin interests of human nature and new horizons in science, and Prokop’s emotional outbursts relieve the tension of his alarming researches into a world of unknown forces. The Princess herself is an explosive of the most dangerous kind, and very clever is the scene of her last appearance, where the feminine fuse, so to say, is withdrawn from the live masculine shell. There is a little too much repetition in the book, but the poetical, symbolistic ending, in which Prokop loses his uncanny powers, atones for the high pressure of various over-energised pages. Mr. Hyde’s translation reads excellently.