[Future] social historians may find a lot to interest them in Snow's novels. But no literary work can be justified by its subject matter alone, though Snow's admirers sometimes seem to imply that he is such a good novelist simply because he writes about so many different aspects of our society…. Inevitably an author must be judged not merely on the variety of his materials, but on what he makes of it. (p. 215)

One of my initial difficulties in reading Snow at all is in coming to terms with his prose, which is at worst so arid as to be almost unreadable—Strangers and Brothers is particularly bad in this respect—and at best efficacious but banal…. I must emphasize that my objection to Snow's style is not primarily aesthetic; it is, rather, that I find it functionally disabling. Eliot's account of significant events is frequently so inexpressive that the reader has difficulty in being convinced of the emotional reality of what is described.

Snow himself has made it clear that though 'Strangers and Brothers' is meant to provide a variety of insights into contemporary society, the central interest of the work lies in Eliot himself. In a note to The Conscience of the Rich he writes that the inner design of the sequence 'consists of a resonance between what Lewis Eliot sees and what he feels. Some of the more important emotional themes he observes through others' experience, and then finds them enter into his own.' He instances the theme of possessive love, which appears in The Conscience of the Rich with Mr March's relation to his son, and which reappears in The New Men with Eliot's relation to his brother Martin, and again in Homecomings in his relations with Margaret. As a statement of intention this is of some interest, though it doesn't much modify my actual reading of 'Strangers and Brothers.' Yet it does indicate that Snow regards the sequence as a carefully planned whole. This being so, it is all the more surprising that he seems to have had no qualms about sticking throughout to the convention of the first-person narrator. There is no absolute reason why it shouldn't be used, provided the author understands its limitations. Snow, unfortunately, doesn't seem particularly aware of the inherent difficulties: here, in my opinion, lies the central flaw of 'Strangers and Brothers.'

In general, first-person narration falls into two kinds. In one the narrator is no more than a detached observer, a 'camera eye', who records the events taking place around him and keeps his own personality as unobtrusive as possible. The other is more avowedly autobiographic in form, where the narrator is actively involved in the tale, and may even be its central character…. Both these kinds have their characteristic dangers. With the 'camera eye' method the narrator has to see and record everything important that happens: if he is describing a small and enclosed world this need not present any difficulties, but the larger and more varied the society, the greater the danger of manifest contrivance on the author's part in order to have his narrator in the right place at the right time. With the 'autobiographic' method, where the narrator is much more at one with what he writes about, this difficulty may not arise: but there is a corresponding one, which is that he will be unable to describe naturally and convincingly his own deepest emotional experiences: in such cases a note of embarrassment or strain nearly always obtrudes. In 'Strangers and Brothers' Snow uses both types of narration: in Time of Hope and Homecomings Lewis Eliot tells his personal history, and in the other novels he is an observer of the lives and actions of others.

In Time of Hope and The Masters, which I take to be his two most successful novels, Snow is largely able to avoid these inherent difficulties, though for very different reasons. Time of Hope was the third novel in the sequence to be published, but it takes first place chronologically, for it deals with Lewis Eliot's boyhood, youth and early manhood…. [The] first part of Time of Hope, which tells of Lewis Eliot's boyhood, and his ambiguous relations with his possessive and ambitious mother, seems to me to have an imaginative quality and emotional force that I don't find anywhere else in Snow's fiction. One is reminded, at times of the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers. The disabling quality of the style is less apparent here than in the other books, and the events of Eliot's boyhood are both intensely felt and given the kind of distancing that enables the author to describe them with imaginative freedom. There is an authenticity of feeling in the first part of Time of Hope which makes one aware, by contrast, of the thinness and shallowness of other parts of 'Strangers and Brothers.' In the later chapters we follow Eliot through his early struggles and successes, and his intense and hopeless passion for Sheila Knight. In his account of this relationship Snow's success is certainly less assured than in the boyhood chapters, but it must be recognized.

It is true that we don't really participate in Eliot's love for Sheila, and this is not surprising. For a first-person narrator to convey successfully and convincingly the quality of an over-mastering sexual love is so rare as to be almost unknown (the only work I can think of that comes anywhere near doing this is Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, though there may be others). Snow's attempts to do so result in vague emphatic gesturing, in a prose that is not just banal but positively and embarrassingly bad…. Yet despite this, we are made aware of the object of Eliot's love. The elusive personality of Sheila Knight, neurotic, destructive, pitiable, and yet oddly engaging, is caught and realized. She is almost the only one of Snow's female characters of whom this can be said. And though we can't share in Eliot's love for Sheila, we do sense the anguish that was an inescapable part of their relationship, both before and, still more, after their marriage.

In Homecomings, Snow's second sustained essay in the autobiographic mode, Eliot is further from his roots in early life and almost wholly absorbed in the world of affairs. In consequence the emotional texture of the novel seems very much thinner than that of Time of Hope…. Unlike Sheila, [Eliot's second wife] Margaret (for me, at least) doesn't begin to exist as a person: she is a mere cypher, adorned with various agreeable attributes…. [In] Homecomings [Snow] seems no longer interested in even attempting to present the quality of Eliot's love. (pp. 215-19)

In the other novels Eliot is not at the centre of affairs, but is, to a greater or lesser extent, an observer of other people. And here Snow falls foul of the danger that the 'camera eye' method of narration will make the story-teller seem overtly inquisitive, and even something of an eavesdropper and voyeur. Though Eliot's personality remains in many ways elusive, one does carry away the impression—which is probably irrelevant to Snow's intentions—that he is an indefatigable recipient of other people's confidences, and the kind of person who is much given to listening quietly and intently to private conversations…. [The] weakness is particularly apparent in The Conscience of the Rich, where we have to believe that Eliot, a Gentile and something of a social outsider, is so completely accepted by an aristocratic and clannish Jewish family that he is able to be present at their most intimate family discussions…. Few of us have the good fortune to be so invariably in the right place at the right time as Eliot does. Things might be more plausible if, just occasionally, Eliot missed some vital piece of information by not being on the spot when it was delivered. Again, in The New Men, one can believe that Eliot, as a wartime Civil Servant, is actively concerned with an atomic research project, but when we also have to accept that his brother is one of the scientists engaged on the project, so that Eliot has personal as well as official knowledge of the scheme one becomes a little incredulous. In the 'autobiographic' method the narrator is in some sense prior to the events he describes, they only happen at all because they happen to him; whereas with the 'camera eye' approach he is subservient to events, and is only there because they must be described. Snow has, I think, failed in the surely impossible task of effectively combining the two modes.

In some of the novels in 'Strangers and Brothers' Eliot is not so much concerned with a succession of events as with telling the story of some particular personality who is close to him. This, for instance, is the basis of The Light and the Dark, a work which I can only regard as a total failure. The central figure is Roy Calvert…. He is constantly before our eyes, and we are told a great deal about him. Nevertheless, he remains totally unrealized as a character: we simply don't feel that he was such a remarkable man as Snow tries to make us believe. In this failure of realization the limitations in Snow's narrative style become very apparent…. [His initial description] makes Calvert no more than a walking cliché from an old-fashioned novelette. (pp. 219-20)

Strangers and Brothers is another novel where the action is centred in a supposedly powerful and unusual personality. In fact, George Passant emerges much more fully as a character than Calvert, and within limits one can accept him for what he is: a solicitor's clerk in the provincial town where Eliot grew up, who is unusually able and intelligent, idealistic and at the same time somewhat boorish, with strong physical passions. Yet the whole intention of the novel is that we should see Passant as more than just this. We also have to believe that he was a man of such charm and personal magnetism that he could command the devotion and allegiance of a large circle of young people. And this is asking us to believe rather more than we are actually given: one isn't at all sure precisely what it was in George Passant's character that made him such a commanding person.

It is, then, to The Masters that we must turn if we wish to see Snow at his best in using Eliot as an observer. This story of Cambridge college politics has become deservedly popular, and has been aptly described by Lionel Trilling as 'a paradigm of the political life'. Though it lacks the imaginative depth of parts of Time of Hope it is certainly Snow's most successful piece of contrivance. Paradoxically, it suffers from a similar fault to The Light and the Dark in that though Jago, the favoured candidate for the Mastership of Eliot and his party, is frequently described as a man of admirable and unusual personal gifts, these are in no way made real to the reader. Yet in The Masters this is not a major fault, since the real interest is not centred in Jago but in the cross-currents of intrigue and bargaining that surround him in the small, jealous world of the senior common room. We are not concerned with exploring a single personality in depth, but in the interrelations between a group of characters, none of whom need be so fully realized. The peculiar structure of The Masters means that Snow's weaknesses are less apparent than usual, while at the same time his strength can be fully displayed. Thus, since Eliot is one of the dons most actively concerned in the election, he has an integral part in all the conversations that take place and which he reports: here he is in no sense an eavesdropper. Again, the subject of sexual love, which Snow usually has trouble with, is largely absent from the novel…. Most of the time we are in a wholly masculine society, given over to intrigue and a particular struggle for power. And it is in writing of intrigue and power-struggles that Snow excels. The other novels are most alive when dealing with similar subjects: as for instance in the trial of George Passant in Strangers and Brothers, the intrigues concerning the Communist news-letter in The Conscience of the Rich, and in the unmasking of the atomic spy Sawbridge in The New Men. Here, too, Snow has most scope for his special abilities in characterization. Usually unsuccessful in depicting attractive young men or women he can draw effective portraits of middle-aged or elderly men, especially those with eccentric tendencies. In The Masters there are the two elderly dons, Despard-Smith and Gay: elsewhere in the sequence one can think of Mr March, Martineau, Bevill, Austin Davidson, and above all, the shady but amiable barrister, Herbert Getliffe, perhaps Snow's most vividly realized single character.

Another element of interest in The Masters is Snow's constant use of certain motifs which occur elsewhere in the sequence and which are, on an imaginative level, the only genuine linking elements in it. These can be resolved to two basic images: the snug, enclosed room, usually with a bright fire burning in the grate and the curtains drawn; and the complementary image of lighted windows seen from outside…. It is significant that Snow should have associated Eliot with [the first of these images] when he first presented him to the reader, in the opening sentences of Strangers and Brothers: 'The fire in our habitual public-house spurted and fell. It was a comfortable fire of early autumn, and I basked beside it, not caring how long I waited.' This motif comes quite naturally in The Masters, since so many of the discussions inevitably take place in front of bright fires in curtained college rooms: at the same time, its recurrence gives an additional imaginative unity to the book.

The opposed image of the lighted window occurs more often in the other novels. It was first evident in Time of Hope, when the young Eliot spent long painful hours looking up at the lights of Sheila's house…. In fact, it is not difficult to associate these recurrent images with the personality of Eliot: the 'lighted windows' motif can be taken as standing for his sense of himself as an outsider, looking aspiringly at the symbols of power, riches, and sexual success. (pp. 221-23)

On the other hand the image of the snug, enclosed room can easily stand for Lewis's complementary sense of having 'arrived,' of now being a part of the world of high-powered discussions and well-conducted love-affairs. Yet there seems to be more to it than this: one does not have to be a very committed Freudian to catch the insistent suggestions of a womb-symbol in the recurring image of the warm, curtained room…. Not for nothing do we remember how Eliot's relationship with his mother had dominated the early chapters of Time of Hope. It is, I think, in these two motifs that we have the clue to the personality of Lewis Eliot, which is revealed as considerably more regressive than Snow would have us believe. Eliot, for all his ability and worldly success, has never really escaped from the obsessions of his early childhood and adolescence.

Beyond this, we really know very little about Eliot. 'You're not as nice as people think,' says Sheila to the young Lewis in Time of Hope. One is inclined to comment that one doesn't know how nice or how nasty Eliot in fact is. On the one hand he seems to have great charm, since so many people like him, and to be trustworthy, since so many of them confide in him. But on the other hand he is obsessed with power—'I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense' …—and he can act with extreme rughlessness…. All these characteristics could exist together in the same individual, admittedly, but he would be, to say the least of it, a morally complex personality who would need very careful realization to seem convincing. And this Snow is not capable of giving. Eliot remains a fragmentary collection of attributes.

There is an additional reason for this fragmentation, inherent in the form of the novel itself. 'Strangers and Brothers' proceeds by a method of simultaneous progression rather than a successive one. That is to say, two or three novels may cover the same period of time, and in each of them Eliot will be concerned with a different set of events…. Were Eliot really plausible these separate strands of experience would be co-existing in his consciousness and sensibility, modifying each other, and together forming new patterns. Instead of which they are separated into water-tight compartments. In each case, Eliot is less than the events he is describing, and there is no unifying principle to be detected.

Although Snow has claimed that the central interest of 'Strangers and Brothers' lies in 'a resonance between what Lewis Eliot sees and what he feels', this is scarcely possible: there is such a radical lack of balance between the two that one cannot conceive of a genuine 'resonance'…. If I have dealt somewhat exhaustively with flaws in characterization, it is because in the Trollopian mode that Snow favours solidity of character-drawing is of greater importance than it would be in a more formalized approach to fiction. I have deliberately said nothing about the moral assumptions underlying 'Strangers and Brothers', since they would require extended treatment of another sort. But they seem to me distinctly shallow: the book's underlying morality doesn't transcend the code of the good-chap-cum-man-of-the-world. Eliot, in fact, is too close to his world: he can describe it in fascinated detail, but he is not able to interpret it meaningfully. (pp. 223-25)