Comparing The Fixer with Darkness at Noon - and with 12 Years a Slave

Barnard Malamud's excellent and harrowing novel The Fixer recalls both a book and a movie - in an odd way it makes me think of Darkness at Noon, another saga of a man unjustly imprisoned and struggling through the hardships of prison life, heading toward inevitable doom. That was set in Stalinist Soviet Union and the theme was more of political oppression, whereas The Fixer, thought written a decade or so after Darkness, is set earlier - in late Czarist Russia, and the theme isn't politics directly but anti-Semitism and racial hatred (tied in with survivalist politics, of course). Also reminds me, sorrowfully, of the great recent movie 12 Years a Slave - the parallels very striking: a man sets out from his small town to the big city (in 12 Years it's for only what he thinks will be short visit, in The Fixer it's to start a new life), and is unjustly detained - in 12 Years sold into slavery, in The Fixer imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of ritualistically murdering a child. Both works focus on the vast cultural injustice and on the suffering of the protagonist. I don't know how The Fixer will end, nor how closely based on an individual case, as 12 Years is, but I find the novel so incredibly sad and frightening - maybe made even more so by the somewhat jaunty and comic first chapters as Yakov sets off for Kiev with his broken-down horse. His callous treatment of the horse is of course a foreshadowing of what will happen to him in the hands of justice; his crossing the river by ferry at night, into Kiev, is a deeply symbolic passage - into death and darkness. I think Yakov Bok's imprisonment is much worse than that in Darkness or even 12 Years, in that it involves near-complete isolation from any human contact. There are some astonishing scenes during his imprisonment, aside from the precise descriptions of the miserable and frightening prison conditions: the betrayal by a fellow-inmate who offers to help (this scene is so much like 12 Years that I wonder if Malamud had read the source material), the horrible discovery (I won't spoil it) Yakov makes when the guard "mistakenly" leaves his cell door ajar, his trek to the prison doctor, crawling on hands and knees because of his infected feet, which inevitably evokes thoughts of Jesus bearing the cross to Golgotha. All told, an incredibly powerful novel so far - a great advance for Malamud after the amusing, sometimes brilliant, but largely conventional A New Life - both in the Library of America Novels and Stories from the 1960s.