C. P. Snow's Disconcerting Narrator:

...Judged separately by the conventions of the dramatic novel, the hooks have to be construed as failures...

...In the end, one simply cannot evaluate Roy's actions properly because one has only known of him through Lewis Eliot...

...Snow has attempted to explore the consciousness of Lewis Eliot within the framework of the rather broad scope of British society during the past five decades, giving special attention along the way to its new and enduring institutions, its heroic figures, its complex and crumbling class divisions and its most pertinent ideological conflicts...

...Only eight of the volumes have been published thus far, and it is not yet possible to make accurate final judgments on Snow's wide-ranging project...

...My own view is that they are not failures but rather imperfect and private novels, and that they could have been compressed into one substantial two- or three-volume novel about the life and times of Lewis Eliot...

...The result is that the brilliant, handsome, wealthy Roy remains a trifle opaque throughout his long ordeal...

...Unfortunately, as it now stands, Strangers and Brothers lacks just this unity and strength...

...yet it is much more immediate and appealing than The Light and the Dark as a work of fiction precisely because it comprises Lewis Eliot's "direct" experiences...

...He is our only source of information in all of the books, both the protagonist and author's camera eye...

...Of the two novels under discussion here, Time of Hope is the more conventional type of novel...

...They are also the reason why it seems superior to scores of others that are technically about the education of a young man from the provinces...

...That scandal is referred to in a rather judicious half paragraph in Time of Hope, but when we next meet Roy himself in The Light and the Dark his inclinations have changed...

...Perhaps the chief cause of this imbalance is Lewis Eliot...

...Such a novel could have covered approximately the same time span as Strangers and Brothers, and it could have included all of the characters, conflicts and incidents presently focused upon...

...he is no longer homosexual, but suicidal...

...It is Lewis Eliot's total recall that conditions us to Snow's world: When he fails to make private experience public in his scrupulous and well-mannered way, then we can only scratch our heads in bewilderment, boredom and disbelief...

...His charm, his attainments as an Orientalist, his aberrations, are immensely credible when EliotSnow lets you see them, but his remarkable lack of vigor in sustaining himself or bolstering himself against his own disbelief reminds one just a little bit of the well-mannered desperation of the detective story villain upon being found out: It is too reckless, automatic and glib to partake of the heroic...

...Trollope and Balzac in more or less the same ways), he would have been able to range about with perfect freedom from place to place and from mind to mind at the very same time that he was providing a running gossipy commentary of the particular circumstances in his own voice...

...True, Snow is a master of a special bare monosyllabic prose...

...The Lewis Eliot of The Light and the Dark is still the same fellow— a bit older, more cautious, a bit wiser —but here he is quite frankly telling the story of another man: Roy Calvert, a brilliant but moody young Cambridge don a few years younger than Eliot...

...and he exhibits the most uncanny intuitions in choosing vivid and credible details of speech and conduct to dress up his excursions into academic, scientific, aristocratic and bureaucratic life in England...

...One long novel also would have achieved a more comprehensive and dramatic shape, and the various major figures might have acquired a greater measure of autonomy and vigor...

...It tells the story of his education and marriage, and of his painful coming to an awareness of human error and human limitations...

...If he had remained omniscient (as did George Eliot, Tolstoy...

...The Lewis Eliot of Time of Hope is a very intelligent fellow beset with serious difficulties which command the reader's sympathy...

...Roy Calvert was first introduced in the title novel of the sequence, Strangers and Brothers, where he was still a boy from Eliot's hometown and he had formed a deliriously adolescent crush on one of Eliot's comrades, causing considerable local scandal...

...Reviewed by Richard M. Elman Author, "A -Coat for the Tsar...

...It would have avoided the present elaborate and awkward system of cross-referencing of characters and incidents from one volume to the next, the annoying overlapping of the various chronicles and the continuous restatement and reiteration of already established points about one character or another...

...The restraint, the precision and the almost wearisome flexibility with which Eliot discusses his provincial upbringings, his strong, proud mother and ineffectual father, his stifled ambitions, his tragic love affair and marriage to a helplessly frigid woman—these qualities are what define this work as an absorbing and particularized novel about a young Englishman growing away from his milieu...

...But when the novels are considered in their present entirety, it seems that too much has been left out of the picture of the England that one has come to know from even the most paltry newspaper accounts, and also that too much has been included that could never have been central to anybody's English experience—interminable popping of bottles of claret in Cambridge rooms and other similar evocations of nostalgia and clubbiness...

...Roy Calvert's unhappiness is described by Eliot with the same unhurried perseverance of tone and dialect with which he narrates the election of a new college master in The Masters, or the decision of a well-brought-up young man to switch from law to medicine in The Conscience of the Rich...

...He finally succeeds (despite the devoted efforts of all his friends to stop him) by volunteering for the Royal Air Force's night bomber raids over Germany...

...contributor, "Paris Review" "Saturday Review" Time of Hope is the second novel and The Light and the Dark the third in C. P. Snow's ambitious 11-volume sequence entitled Strangers and Brothers...

...Snow has forfeited the traditional omniscience of the social novelist for the masque of Lewis Eliot...

...Yet his novels are not dramatic and they do not add up to a panorama of English life...

...Roy is unable to believe in God and he is bent on destroying himself...

...One is left with the uncomfortable feeling that Snow has chosen to write through Eliot because he finds it so easy to mimic him, and that what started out to be another Comédie Humaine has ended up as an extremely private view of things, interesting and skillfully written, but for the most part hopelessly discursive and neutral...

...But as Lewis Eliot he is constantly restricted to one point of view, one set of perceptions and a limited mobility...

...It may even be a little unfair at this juncture to comment on the sequence as a whole, but such criticism is unavoidable because the individual novels do not appear to have been written as autonomous works of art...

...he is both deliberate and adroit as a story teller...

...Snow's failure in this instance is symptomatic of his larger failure in the entire Strangers and Brothers sequence...

...This novel, along with Homecoming, composes the narrator's confession, and it appears early enough in the sequence to condition the reader to Eliot as an honest and candid observer...

...Snow's narrator and major fi sure...