Satan Is Missing

...We read large parts of Paradise Lost only because we are interested in theology, but it is always Satan who has our hearts...

...Snow's characters, however, are by nature given to abstraction, and drama is constantly dissipated in words...

...And yet, by the side of the George Passants, we could never suggest to those round us that revelation, that insight into pathos, which came from seeming innocent, uncorrupt, and without defense...

...The repeated clusters of rhetorical questions reflect the fact that he is dealing with characters who are professionally inscrutable and whose very existence depends on a surface that defies dramatizing...

...These speeches are at the heart of the matter, but how can they be handled...

...It was, in his fits of suspicion, of feeling done down and persecuted, he was naked to the world...

...Also, the situation requires that there be a number of speeches in Parliament...

...Eliot promises to pay the bills but does not go himself...

...As the "Strangers and Brothers" series has progressed and the characters have passed from becoming to being, the dramatic tension has tended to drop, and the interest has come to lie in what are really extra-literary values...

...Questions can be formulated, but no more...

...Reported in full...

...We read it because we are interested—as Snow insists we ought to be—in the way the world goes...

...Snow is obliged to set up as the force opposing Ouaife's plan merely a climate of opinion...

...He proposes instead for Britain to give a moral lead and to lessen tension by reducing, by one...

...the decisions in his private life never come to stand for the decisions in the greater problems of the novel, and again a character fails to stand in himself for much more than himself...

...Reviewed by DANIEL CURLEY Author, "A Stone Man, Yes" Corridors of Power is the ninth of the 11 novels projected by C P. Snow in his "Strangers and Brothers" series...

...For example, the concept of the extreme rigor of moral responsibility comes alive for a moment only when Eliot is asked to help an old acquaintance in trouble with the police...

...I was the worse for it...

...As a result the book seems to exist on the level of pure idea, and its fictional weakness lends support to the theory of fiction as a charade: If responsibility, say, is the subject, responsibility is the one word that cannot be used in the charade...

...The interest that it has is finally the interest of a private journal or correspondence...

...If the book has one thing to say, it is this: We must spend ourselves again and again in efforts of good will or there will be nothing left to save ourselves for...

...In the absence of a concrete villain...

...Only at one or two points do the central problems find an adequate echo in human terms, and it is instructive to see what happens there and does not happen in the rest of the book...

...Indeed, one of the points debated in the book is the extent of a single man's influence...

...We might behave better: we might need help out of proportion more: we might even be genuinely pathetic...

...Non-dramatic...

...The minister...

...Perhaps Snow's awareness as a participant in history has blunted his awareness as an artist of what is needed to turn history into art...

...In this segment of Snow's great work, the viewpoint character, Lewis Eliot, is associated with the struggle of a young cabinet minister to initiate a policy that will take Britain out of the atomic arms race...

...Roger Quaife, is convinced that Britain is no longer capable of maintaining its place as a first-rate power and that any attempt to compete with Russia and the United States will certainly lead to economic disaster at home and very likely to general holocaust...

...He called for, and got, sympathy in the way most of us could never do...

...Ouaife's attempt to line up support for his plan constitutes the book's action...

...It not only talks about politics and power, but it talks about them in terms of morality and commitment and responsibility...

...Perhaps the basic error of the book has been to assume that what is dramatic in ordinary historic terms will be dramatic in artistic terms...

...In the nature of things no final answers can be honestly given...

...To be loyal to his thesis...

...I had used money to buy off my fellowfeeling, to save trouble, to save myself the expense of spirit 1 was no longer impelled to spend...

...Perhaps Snow set himself an impossible problem in this book...

...Summarized...

...This lack of a Satan, however, is a very real handicap to the book...

...But it is precisely in the vicinity of these abstractions and speculations that the book breaks down as fiction...

...Intolerable...

...In addition, not only are the characters difficult, the material itself is peculiarly intractable...

...Corridors of Power is curiously inert so that one may be obliged finally to pass two judgments on it, one as a tract for our time and one as a novel...

...The book is, therefore, not only instructive but also inspiring and even frightening, as when a scientist, paraphrasing Snow's own much-publicized and often-challenged position, remarks, "The time-scale of applied science is something like 10 times faster [than the time scale of politics...

...If you're going to wait too long before everyone agrees, then the overwhelming probability is that there won't be anything left to wait for...

...Even the scientist Brodzinski is introduced very tentatively and finally dismissed as paranoid, and he is the nearest thing to a villain there is...

...George Passant, alas, has long since disappeared from the scene, and no one has arisen to take his place...

...We are shown the entire apparatus that lies behind the public speech Quaife finally makes in Parliament: opinions of scientific advisors, committee maneuvers of civil servants, trial balloon speeches, constant analysis of public reaction, private discussions among colleagues, pressures at great country houses, lobbying of industrialists...

...It reflects also the author's characteristic strong instinct for story—the kind of story that, as ?. ?. Forster once defined it, makes the reader ask, "And then what happened...

...the number of nations involved in the general insanity...

...Snow can have no real villain...

...In addition, the book is full of a certain kind of idealism...

...By now this kind of compulsion had grown dim...

...There is nothing wrong with this interest...

...Although Roger Quaife has a mistress, and to that extent has a private life and personal problems...

...What usually happens is a summary sketch by narrator Eliot, a few rhetorical questions, and the observation that Quaife has never put on a better performance...

...As might have been expected, it reflects the high seriousness of a mind devoted to thinking continually on issues that are truly great...

...The point is made repeatedly, but only this once is it made as a novel would make it rather than as a tract would...

...As a work of fiction, however...

...Corridors of Power is like Paradise Lost without Satan, but even so there remains a discussion that never fails to be attractive: Are we reasoning animals or merely animals capable of reason...

...In speaking of an old friend, Lewis Eliot makes an acute analysis of what is actually wrong: "It was not entirely, or even mainly, his generosity, his great balloon-like dreams, that drew the young: It was not the scale of his character or his formidable passions...

...In this case, Lewis Eliot, successful and happily married, cannot add the dramatic element he could have when he was on the make and married to an impossible woman...

...So meticulously is Quaife's campaign charted that Corridors of Power may well come to be considered a handbook of British politics and judged as one would judge, let us say, The Prince rather than as one would judge a political novel like All the King's Men...