Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s. This was hardly surprising. Shares in ‘Snow Preferred’ are, in Wodehouse’s phrase, ‘down in the cellar with no takers’. I would guess that very few under the age of, say, 50 have read the 11 volumes of his Strangers and Brothers sequence, published between 1940 and 1970. Yet he was then regarded as a major English novelist, and the sequence as being as important and ambitious as Powell’s.
Malcolm Bradbury, who had, I suspect, as a young man a greater admiration for Snow’s work than when he came to write The Modern English Novel (1993), described the sequence as
modern history seen from the inside, an account of the intentions and conflicts of the teachers, academics, lawyers, politicians, scientists and bureaucrats who over the troubled and often anarchic march of history hope to make reason, justice and progress prevail in human affairs, and who eventually shape and administer the changes in postwar Britain.
This is a fair enough summary, though it makes the novels seem more arid than they are. But at least it makes it clear that Snow had a real and worthwhile subject matter, something that can’t be said of all admired novelists today. He wrote for grown-ups and he is one of the few English novelists capable of writing seriously and intelligently about public life, about men — rarely women — who get things done.
There’s a passage in Homecomings, one of the best novels in the sequence, which admirably displays his understanding of these matters. His narrator, Lewis Eliot, a lawyer, is a wartime civil servant; the head of his department, Hector Rose, is a man with an ‘aptitude for power’.
Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink.
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