Allan Massie

Snow on the way again?

Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s.

issue 29 July 2006

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.

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