[To] blame Snow's style for lacking virtues which are not only irrelevant but would be completely out of place in the character of his work is … inadequate. Lawrence Durrell can patch his pretentious productions with prose poetry to hide the joints, but for Snow the style is the work and his sparse prose has an organic function in the structure of the novels. He does not force his significances on us but lets them emerge naturally from the surrounding circumstances. The style is intentionally flat, recording every detail as the story proceeds through a level series of short chapters, each preoccupied with a single incident, some significant, others not. There is no emphasis on one more than another. As in real life, climaxes occur almost unrecognized in the steady procession of existence, and Snow never raises his voice. Each occasion is recorded in isolation so that casual relationship speaks for itself and emerges only when it is necessary for the story. (p. 568)

There is no reason to deny that certain books in the ['Strangers and Brothers' series] are weak. Homecomings for instance, is basically a brilliant novella, a study in inevitable schizophrenic despair; and the rest of the novel, tagged on after Sheila's suicide, is a let-down and acceptable only because of its structural importance in the progress of the series. None the less, one cannot help feeling it could have been done differently and much better. Strangers and Brothers too, is insufficiently taut: there is a tentativeness of approach about it, that its successors have overcome. But to ascribe this weakness to the characterization of George Passant seems perverse.

'One isn't at all sure,' Mr Bergonzi complains [see excerpt above], 'what it is in George Passant's character that made him such a commanding person', when the whole point of the book is spiritual poverty of the provinces in the 'twenties, where even a man like Passant, specious and full of the clichés of the metropolitan radical atmosphere, can because of his emotional warmth have a catalytic effect far beyond his spiritual calibre.

To find Snow's greatest success, as Mr Bergonzi does, in the earlier parts of A Time of Hope, is to impose the wrong criteria. Certainly Eliot's development among the lower middle classes of the Midland town, particularly his relationship with his mother, is well done; but this is all part of the Balzacian meticula that build the story, not the principal theme. To praise or condemn Snow's success in depicting such a relationship is equally incompetent. What contributes to Snow's purpose is not what he has in common with the inter-war novelists who recaptured their childhood for a reading public for whom this is exotic, nor even those (Lawrence springs to mind) who, much more profoundly than Snow, found their inspiration in these roots. This might lead to the sort of Bildungsroman more familiar to critics and therefore easier to judge, but it is irrelevant to Snow's intention, where the earlier development is a function of the society which, as a complex, is Snow's theme…. Mr Bergonzi himself has drawn attention to the persistence of certain images in Snow's work and their structural importance: it seems strange that he would ignore the symbolic value of the continually changing social setting. This is significant, not because of its variety but for the unity which can be found within this variety. For whatever world it reflects, the high politics of the Bevills, the professional world of the bar, the worlds of scholarship and research of literature or of human relationships, its preoccupation is the same: Power; and its manifestation in different circumstances is the theme of the whole series, a theme upon which unity is imposed by this variegated society itself, rather than by Lewis Eliot. (pp. 569-70)

Snow alone amongst post-war English novelists has come to terms with Hiroshima, has accepted that our whole civilization must bear its implications, as the whole German people must bear those of Auschwitz and Lidice. (p. 570)

The theme of The New Men is really a question. How is it, the scientists ask, that we have reached the abyss? Who is responsible? and this, by implication, is the subject of Snow's whole series. For 'Who is responsible' is merely another way of asking 'Where does power lie?'

It is a Stendhalian question, but the answer is very English: 'Usually it builds itself from a thousand small arrangements: ideas, compromises, bits of give and take'. The jockeying for position and prestige which takes up so much of official life is suddenly seen to be of vital importance: for only the right men in the right place could have stopped the unnecessary bomb, and this the scientists fail to achieve. It is committee politics, however petty, that determine momentous results and in face of them the individual is helpless. One committee is very much like another, whether the local committee that opens Strangers and Brothers (a much more pervasive image this than the snug room, almost indeed a key signature) or the deliberations of the cabinet. That intricate study of personal politics, The Masters, is the essential clue to the events of The New Men. Through Eliot, the temporary civil servant's eyes, we see the final powerlessness even of the minister, even of the permanent head of a department like Hector Rose. Beginning, it would seem, from almost the same premises as the existentialists, Snow differs completely in his conclusions. In the end it would seem that not the Napoleonic figures, nor the oligarchies can be accepted as the genuine wielders of power; its true symbol is rather Arthur Brown, the comfortable, tenacious, conservative intriguer with a knowledge both of the limits of the possible and those minor human quirks whose myriad interactions underlie great events.

Here, surely, lies the explanation of Snow's attitude to human relations. Jago, Mr Bergonzi explains, is never made sympathetic enough to justify Eliot's insistence on his likeability. But the book is not an introspective study of Jago's character, but rather a dissection of its effects. Eliot's dryness is deliberate, for even in their private lives,… Snow's characters seem perennially in committee; and life is made up of the apparently minute shifts of such relationships. Each novel is a study of some particular individual in what might be called his political capacity, his power-relationship to other people. For Snow all relationship is one of balance between individuals, of compromise and the maintenance of integrity. For Snow, but not necessarily for Eliot who is fallible and who, though frequently the witness and confidant in situations where he is not directly involved (a position incidentally that does not seem to me as contrived as it does to Mr. Bergonzi; one has after all known people who, not implicated themselves, seem always to be present in "inside" circumstances) is himself ineffective when his own life comes into play.

Public and private life interfuse, affecting each other only too sincerely; in Eliot's surroundings Snow finds a microcosm of the world. It is in the implications to Eliot of these surroundings, the resonance (if that unfortunate word must be used) between this and Eliot's own involvements, that is the purpose of Snow's series, and whether successful or not it is an attempt on a different scale from the cosy little introspective novel Mr Bergonzi seems to expect when he dismisses Eliot as 'a fragmentary collection of attributes'. (pp. 570-71)