Franz Kafka’s The Trial was not what I expected. It does have the Orwellian appearance of a lone individual going into battle against a vast bureaucracy. This has led it to be interpreted as a novel that predicts totalitarianism. But the use of surrealism, the possible connection to early Existentialism and the main character’s attitude towards women suggests there is more going on in Kafka’s unfinished masterpiece.

Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K, for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.

Josef K wakes up in bed one morning in his lodgings and finds the cook is late with his breakfast. Instead he is met by two Warders who tell K that he is under arrest. At first they are all relaxed about the news. The Warders even seem to suggest they are doing K some sort of favour even as they eat his breakfast.

‘You are not allowed to go from here. You are after all under arrest.’ ‘So it would seem,’ said K. ‘And for what reason?’ he then asked. ‘It’s not our job to tell you that. Go into your room and wait. The proceedings have now been started and you will learn everything in good time. I am exceeding my instructions by talking to you in such a friendly way.’

K plays along. He knows that acting rashly can be a costly mistake. It is his thirtieth birthday and its possible that this is all some sort of prank. He gets his birth certificate and asks what the charges are and if he can see the warrant. But the Warders deflect and say they are just instruments with no authority. K asks to see their Supervisor but they try to prevent K from seeing him even though he is in the next room. They also warn him against presuming he is innocent. If he does not know what he is accused of and is not an expert in the law, how does he know he is innocent?

The Supervisor also demurs and won’t tell K what the charges are or what he is accused of. But K can continue to go about his normal life and go to work though he is under arrest. K is shocked to see that with the Warders and the Supervisor are three people who work at the same bank as K but at a lower level.

When K returns home at the end of the day, his landlady says she is not worried about his arrest. It is not like K is a real criminal like a thief. It is probably one of those academic legal things. K agrees.

The next day, K gets a phone call telling him there will be regular examinations of his case. The first of these is on Sunday. When Sunday comes around he arrives where he has been told to go. It is not what he expected. A labyrinthine apartment building, filled with children playing, mothers cooking while holding babies, men still in bed.

He eventually finds his destination; a heavily crowded, low-ceilinged room. K works his way to seeing the Magistrate. K unloads on the Magistrate impertinently, even rudely. Says he can see through his deceptions and machinations and leaves.

‘There is no doubt that behind all the utterances of this court, and therefore behind my arrest and today’s examination, there stands a great organisation. An organisation which not only employs corrupt warder and fatuous supervisors and examining magistrates, of whom the best can be said is that they are humble officials, but also supports a judiciary of the highest rank with its inevitable vast retinue of servants, secretaries, police officers and other assistants, perhaps even executioners – I don’t shrink from the word. And the purpose of this great organisation, gentlemen? To arrest innocent persons and start proceedings against them which are pointless and mostly, as in my case, inconclusive. When the whole organisation is as pointless as this, how can gross corruption among the officials be avoided? That’s impossible, not even the highest judge could manage that. That’s why warders try to steal the very clothes arrested persons are wearing, that’s why supervisors break into people’s houses, that’s why innocent men, instead of getting a hearing, are humiliated in front of large gatherings.’

K receives no update about his case but decides to see what he can find out on his own. On his way he witnesses the lives of those in the apartment building, meets court ushers and other defendants. At the insistence of his uncle, who is alarmed that K does not appreciate how serious his case is, K visits an advocate who he hopes will defend him in his case.

The deeper K gets the more surreal these encounters become. There seem to be no simple answers to simple questions. The deeper he goes the more difficult it becomes to see a way out.

‘My innocence doesn’t simplify the matter,’ K said. In spite of everything he had to smile, then he shook his head slowly. ‘What matters are the many subtleties in which the court gets lost. But in the end it produces great guilt from some point where originally there was nothing at all.’

Like the other surviving works of Franz Kafka, The Trial was unfinished at the time of his death. Kafka had asked his friend, Max Brod, to destroy his work on his death but Brod felt unable to do so and the literary world has been grateful ever since. Shorter than The Castle, The Trial is probably Kafka’s most famous work besides his short story Metamorphosis.

The story of a lone man jousting with an enormous, impenetrable, indefatigable bureaucracy, and published in 1925, The Trial imagines a twentieth century of totalitarian governments which have expanded beyond the people’s ability to control them. In this respect, The Trial is said to have anticipated Fascism and Nazism.

This reputation informed my expectations for The Trial. I was prepared for an Orwellian story of the individual in battle with an authoritarian state. But The Trial is not really like that. K is not living in a totalitarian state. K is not a passive victim of the state, searching for a small victory or escape but an active agent determined to force a resolution.

What sort of people were they? What were they talking about? To which authority did they belong? After all, K lived in the country which enjoyed law and order; there was universal peace; all the laws were upheld; so who dared pounce on him in his own home?

It makes the reader wonder what The Trial is really about.

Being unfinished, it can be difficult to be sure. It is also difficult to know what to make of the style; how much would have been altered with a rewrite or edit. The novel begins with a sense of mystery about K’s case. But unlike a normal mystery where the writer is carefully selective about what to share with the reader, in The Trial the reader in inundated with information and it is difficult to know what will be relevant.

Later in the novel we endure long conversations seemingly loaded with irrelevant information. Paragraphs that run on for pages filled with technicalities about rules, norms, proceedings, pleas, advocates and officials. I found some of this to be frankly boring. Yet at other times it could become interesting where these passages advance the story.

It made me wonder how this style is supposed to affect the reader. I think that two meanings of ‘trial’ are at play here. In the early novel it is about a court case for K but it quickly evolves into an ordeal.

Another aspect of the style of The Trial is surrealism. Kafka clearly breaks the realism with absurd events and encounters. In this sense, The Trial is said to anticipate Existentialism – the anxiety produced in encountering the meaninglessness of life. Although, in K’s case, it seems less like anxiety and more like resentment. K perhaps is being bent towards accepting the absurdity of his predicament.

The Penguin Modern Classics edition I read has an Introduction written by Idris Parry, a professor of German literature. Parry’s Introduction largely omits discussion of what the novel might have to say about Fascism or Existentialism. Instead, Parry focuses mostly on Kafka’s relationship with Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged. The suggestion presumably being that The Trial is an allegory of the relationship.

This is not difficult to believe after reading the novel, especially concerning the character of K. He comes across as a womaniser perhaps with misogynistic tendencies. Alongside the pursuit of his case, K has encounters with a few women. To the benefit of his ego, each seem to need him, even desire him. Determined to not be a passive victim of his circumstances, K is righteous and indignant, sometimes entitled. He sounds like a man in the angry and resentful stage following a break up. Kafka too is described as being a womaniser in life. A man who felt he was tormented by sexual desire.

Having read a short fiction collection including Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial, I am probably at the end of my Kafka reading. It is fair to say that I am unsure why he is held in such high regard. This can happen in cases where the innovative aspects surpass the other elements. Looking retrospectively it can be difficult to see what was so special to those who experienced it firsthand. On the other hand, Kafka’s durability suggests that many readers find more to enjoy in his work than just what might have been new a century ago. That I am not one of those readers may be a purely subjective experience on my part.