Falling Snow

...By investing so little psychological curiosity in the core's emotional commitment to an ideology of change and destruction, Snow remains detached from, deaf to the turbulent inner reality of revolutionary zeal...

...The surmounting of this mechanical duality??the breaking down of the abstract and the generalizing of the particular??is what Hegel called mediation, and it is brilliantly present not only in novels alive with ideology, like The Possessed, but even in a seemingly nonpolitical work like Flaubert's Sentimental Education, where public events become a means of resolving private conflicts, and private life provides an escape from the disorder of 1848...

...Neil, a coarse working-class student at the local university...

...And that's something to build on...

...The result is either a schematization in which the writer clings to abstract concepts that anesthetize the novelistic reality, or a flood of immediate events which are never transcended and whose philosophical significance is never grasped...

...Or he becomes so mesmerized by what actually happened that he is sucked into an overdetailed quicksand of miscellaneity...

...But in his new book, The Malcontents (Scribners, 277 pp., $6.95), Snow has fallen into the trap of schematizing his political generalities through his characters, making the book too manipulative to be convincing...

...When Bernard is eventually identified as the traitor, Snow probes his desperate apostasy with perfunctory mumblings about people who want to be on "the winning side...

...With the single exception of the blunt lower-class Neil, in fact, Snow's young people sound consistently and absurdly middle-aged, and 1 doubt that the fault lies completely in my imperfect American ear...

...and Bernard, a coldly logical revolutionary theorist and son of Jewish refugees...

...Stephen, in guilty opposition to his parents' horror of publicity, decides to testify on Neil's behalf, though this will jeopardize his place at Cambridge...

...A good part of the trouble is that Snow makes so little effort to understand the singularity of motive, the unexpected private turns of sensibility in his characters...

...In such great political novels as The Possessed, 1984 and Man's Fate, as Irving Howe has written, "the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society, has penetrated the consciousness of the characters in all of its profoundly problematic aspects...

...Throughout the book, in their many decorous conversations about the winter of their discontent, Stephen and Mark sound not like the brilliant Cambridge intellectuals they are said to be, but like fatuous adolescents playing at philosophical Ping-Pong with terms they only dimly comprehend...

...Full of gassy confidence, he muses: "Was there something lost, when one had found one's way...

...Fitted into their slots on his fictional blueprint, they are stiff and bloodless, pompously donnish in their talk and awkward in their aggressiveness, like adolescents unaccustomed to independence...

...But not to lose it was like not cutting the ties of youth...

...Snow acknowledges the existence of this force, then fails to follow its development...

...In a provincial English cathedral town some radical students calling themselves "the core," outraged by the rack-rented slums black immigrants are forced to inhabit, engineer a plot to expose the identity of the ghetto's slumlord, an influential Tory MP...

...Although Snow ultimately buttons his young insurgents into an incongruously unyouthful complacency, nothing that has happened or been thought before this smug finale in any way justifies its resolute confidence...

...The remaining conspirators are Tess, the Anglican Bishop's daughter...

...Stephen, the character Snow clearly feels closest to, is miraculously drained of false optimism and romantic utopianism and declares that he has now "found a way...

...Grappling with their confused suspicions, they are struck an even harsher blow when Bernard, during a joyless party, falls mysteriously to his death from a fifth-floor window...

...Robinson, also at Cambridge, is the pampered and charming only son of a wealthy manufacturer...

...In Snow's laboriously diagrammatic characterization, the core is almost a statistical cross section of the town's class and professional levels and, by implication, of all England...

...In the opening chapter, even before their plot can be put into action, Stephen learns that it has been betrayed to the authorities...

...George Eliot described this fictional process as "the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh...

...Furthermore, while one has never looked to C. P. Snow for virtuoso fireworks and literary elegance, his sturdy and sensibly workmanlike prose has always seemed marvelously right to his purpose...

...Though our age is one of bitter and far-ranging political animosity??most dramatically between the revolutionary young and what they conceive to be an oppressive status quo??no one has yet produced in the waning third of the 20th century a work of fiction comparable in illumination to the novels of Dostoevsky, Orwell and Malraux...

...Have you ever asked yourself why you got mixed up in this at all...

...Of course there was...

...But in The Malcontents he often slips from this standard, and some of the images are exceedingly wide of the mark...

...Stephen's close friend Mark...

...All they can produce is a flatulant banality of self-sacrifice: "We haven't been content with what we've got...

...Because C. P. Snow, a scientist and political administrator as well as a novelist, has been among the very few contemporary writers blessed with a subtly comprehensive intelligence about the larger political resonances behind the immediate behavior of individuals, several of the volumes in his recently completed Strangers and Brothers series come close to being the only credible political novels of our time, though he is of course no Dostoevsky...

...The group is sickened to realize that the Judas had to be one of their own...

...Already bitterly demoralized, the core must now face the town's legal apparatus...

...Having established the group's angry desire to change a corrupt and inhuman world, he is evidently satisfied with that unexceptionable, but fictionally uninteresting, generality...

...Stephen and his girl will marry and live in uneasy liberal bliss...

...It is simply not enough in any kind of fiction, and particularly in a political novel, to be this captive to the bland surface of behavior...

...Stephen Freer, a nervously brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, is the son of a complacent upper-middle-class lawyer and his timorously conventional wife...

...Lance, a clever and unstable drug addict...

...Just after Bernard has fallen to his death, Stephen describes "a lake of blood percolating over the flagstones"??in the context, percolating is not only imprecise but tasteless...

...At no point are we made to see if and how these students share in the white-hot intensity of political passion that can drive, ennoble and destroy Dostoev-sky's and Conrad's anarchists...

...In contenting himself with abstract postures, he fails as a novelist to understand what Hegel declares to be the modern task: "actualizing the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determined thoughts...

...With the bemused detachment of an elder literary statesman who is suddenly too tired to cope, he sweeps the unanswerable problems and ambiguities under the carpet...

...Nor does it exhibit that integral insight into abstract political ideas??about class, society, government, money, and the nature of power??that often grows with organic inevitability out of the surface occurrences of the Strangers and Brothers epic...

...Snow is feeblest precisely when Mark and Stephen indulge in prosy speculation about the mainspring of their radicalism...

...Neil is subsequently arrested for possession of marijuana, though he is blameless...

...Neil is through with the university and student politics ??"Instant revolution was a blink in a middle-class eye" ??and will go into the factories to serve the cause among his own class...

...The fundamentally crippling defect of The Malcontents consists in the vague abstractness of the core's energy and action...

...Snow has now gone against his grain by drastically narrowing the scope of his concerns to focus on that peculiarly topical struggle of idealistic students opposing a social system they find viciously deplorable...

...Nothing is either settled or satisfactorily clarified at the end of The Malcontents, yet Snow, always the meliorist, completes the novel as if all the political and private dilemmas it raised had been pragmatically resolved...

...It's a kind of love...

...Beginning with a definite ideology, the novelist nails together some sample characters to illustrate the separate strands of his thought...

...What passes for political fiction these days is usually either reportage or ax-grinding...

...Mark decides he must leave Cambridge and go "somewhere among the really poor...