Prof. Zweig believes his former pupil, Gustav Neumann, may be a dangerous criminal. It starts out as an exciting manhunt for someone who has presumably committed several murders & is about to embark on another. Yet the closer one gets to the supposed murderer, the less clear it is any murders have ocurred at all. "On Christmas Eve, while riding in a London hack, Prof. Karl Zweig sees a man he recognizes, getting into cab outside a hotel on Curzon St. He is so certain he goes immediately to call upon his friend Enid Grey, a retired Scotland Yard Inspector. If he is right he has spotted a dangerous murderer. For a time Necessary Doubt reads exactly like the best of the old-fashioned British thrillers. Then there begins to lurk in Zweig's mind the disturbing suspicion that something is going on just beyond his comprehension; a conviction is growing that what he is experiencing is actually not reality at all, that just beneath the surface a whole new area of meaning is opening up. Yet the more convinced he becomes, the more startling is the depth & clarity of the picture which he finally begins to perceive, for however unorthodox its concept, it is every bit believable."
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.
