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Fiction
Strangers and Brothers series
Main article: Strangers and Brothers
George Passant (first published as Strangers and Brothers), 1940
The Light and the Dark, 1947
Time of Hope, 1949
The Masters, 1951
The New Men, 1954
Homecomings, 1956
The Conscience of the Rich, 1958
The Affair, 1959
Corridors of Power, 1964
The Sleep of Reason, 1968
Last Things, 1970
Other fiction
Death Under Sail, 1932
New Lives for Old, 1933
The Search, 1934
The Malcontents, 1972
In Their Wisdom, 1974, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
A Coat of Varnish, 1979
Non-fiction
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959
Science and Government, 1961, First Four Square Edition, 1963
The Two Cultures and a Second Look, 1963
Variety of men, 1967
The State of Siege, 1968
Public Affairs, 1971
Trollope: His Life and Art, 1975
The Realists, 1978
The Physicists, 1981
Strangers and Brothers is a series of novels by C. P. Snow, published between 1940 and 1970. They deal with – among other things – questions of political and personal integrity, and the mechanics of exercising power.
All eleven novels in the series are narrated by the character Lewis Eliot. The series follows his life and career from humble beginnings in an English provincial town, to reasonably successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement.
The New Men deals with the scientific community's involvement in (and reaction to) the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. The Conscience of the Rich concerns a wealthy, Anglo-Jewish merchant-banking family. Time of Hope and George Passant depict the price paid by clever, poor young men to escape their provincial origins.
Snow analyses the professional world, scrutinising microscopic shifts of power within the enclosed settings of a Cambridge college, a Whitehall ministry, a law firm. For example, in the novels set in the Cambridge college (a thinly veiled Christ's), a small, disparate group of men is typically required to reach a collective decision on an important subject. In The Masters, the dozen or so college members elect a new head (the Master) by majority vote. In The Affair, a small group of dons sets out to correct a possible injustice: they must convince the rest of the college to re-open an investigation into scientific fraud. In both novels, the characters strongly resist letting in the external world, whether it be the press, public opinion, the college "Visitor", or outside experts.
The books were adapted by the BBC into a 13-episode television series, which began airing in January 1984. The series starred Shaughan Seymour as Lewis, Sheila Ruskin as his mentally troubled first wife Sheila and Cherie Lunghi as his second wife Margaret. Other actors who were cast for the series include Anthony Hopkins, Nigel Havers, Peter Sallis and Tom Wilkinson. The series has been released on DVD in the Region 1 format.
The BBC later adapted the books as a 10-episode Radio 4 Classic Serial, first broadcast in 2003, which starred Adam Godley (ep.1-5) then David Haig (ep.6-10) as Lewis, Anastasia Hille as Sheila and Juliet Aubrey as Margaret.
C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers is a roman fleuve comprising eleven novels and covering a period of more than fifty years. The entire sequence is narrated by Lewis Eliot, an intelligent, sensitive, and decent man whose life progresses against the backdrop of some of the critical events of twentieth century history. The sequence is divided into novels of “direct experience” and “observed experience.” Although Lewis Eliot is present in the novels of “observed experience,” his personal life is given a secondary role, as he concentrates on several figures who have played crucial roles in his life. Snow carefully establishes his narrator’s emotional makeup in Time of Hope (which, though Snow’s third book in the series, precedes George Passant and The Light and the Dark in the narrative chronology). Set primarily in an unnamed provincial town in the Midlands of England, the novel depicts Lewis’ early years, characterized by a sense of insecurity stemming from the Eliot family’s genteel poverty following the bankruptcy of his father during World War I.
Although Lewis’ proud, strong-willed mother, Lena, dies when he is only a teenager, her influence upon him proves critical. Married to a kindly but ineffectual man, Lena is forced to transfer her dreams of nower and status to her son. At the same time, she smothers they boy with a possessive love that he cannot return, causing deep-seated emotional problems which will affect his personal relationships for years to come:
Somehow I was so made that . . . I had to reject my mother’s love and its successors. Some secret caution born of a kind of vanity made me bar my heart to any who forced their way within. I had only been able to lose caution and vanity. . . in the torment of loving someone. . . who . . . made me crave for a spark of feeling....
Thus, Lewis is led to pursue the frigid, emotionally unresponsive Sheila Knight, and ultimately to marry her, knowing that she will only cause him pain.
In addition to suggesting the seeds of Lewis’ emotional discontent, Time of Hope chronicles the progress of his professional career, establishing his considerable talent for legal and administrative work. Bearing in mind his mother’s dreams, Lewis makes a risky bid to become a barrister, using his life’s savings to finance his studies and period of apprenticeship. His dedication and hard work result in a measure of success hindered only by a sudden bout of near-fatal illness and his masochistic marriage. Lewis cannot help feeling disillusioned: “I had longed for fame: and I was a second-rate lawyer. I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.” Though Lewis is tempted to leave Sheila, having fought so hard to win her, he feels responsible for her and stays by her side. Despite the nightmare of his marriage, he remains hopeful about the future.
Sharing Lewis’ optimism is his friend and mentor, George Passant, whose lectures at the local technical college encouraged him to become a barrister. Though George’s own story is outlined in Time of Hope, it is rendered more explicitly in the first volume of “observed experience,” George Passant. George is the first of several key figures who significantly influence Lewis’ life and thinking, men of brilliant potential, whose flaws of character prevent their achieving true success. Only slightly older than Lewis, George Passant seems extraordinarily gifted; a solicitor’s clerk, he is intelligent, energetic, and eloquent. He gathers around him a number of devoted young men and women, whom he dubs “the group.” An idealist, George enjoys speaking against the town’s conservative establishment, calling such people “sunkets” and “bellwethers,” and hurts his own career chances when he successfully defends his friend Jack Cotery against charges of having corrupted a fifteen-year-old boy.
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