The Affair [Hardcover]

C.P. Snow (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Macmillan (1966)
• ASIN: B000KT69VU
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Snakes and Ladders of Power, February 8, 2007

By 

Mary E. Sibley (Carneys Point, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Lewis Eliot is the narrator of the novels in the STRANGERS AND BROTHERS series. C.P. Snow, among other things, was a social historian. Tom Orbell is younger than Lewis. He is a Fellow at the Cambridge College to which Lewis's brother Martin is attached. It is 1953. Lewis is introduced by Tom to Laura Howard. One of the younger Fellows has gotten caught in a case of scientific fraud. The man concerned is Laura's husband Donald. Laura wants Tom to reopen the case. Tom casts Lewis as a sort of elder statesman. He may be able to talk with his friends at the college. Laura decides that Lewis is no good at all.

At the college, visiting his brother, Lewis sees Francis Getliffe. Lewis learns that Howard had been a moderately well-known fellow-traveler. Howard has damaged his case with college personnel by blaming his elderly advisor for the lapse. The man, very distinguished, has died recently.

On Christmas night Martin and Lewis eat at the college to spare their wives the trouble of preparing another meal. Lewis is surprised to learn there that one of the Fellows, Skeffington, believes that Howard's case merits re-opening because a page received in the last batch of notebooks of the deceased scientist may support Howard's explanation of the discrepancy. When Lewis approaches Francis Getliffe to support re-opening the case, he discovers that Francis is inclined, with no particular urging of Lewis, to recommend that the matter be reconsidered. Getliffe's position in the matter is bound to sway others.

In the course of taking testimony it is inevitable that Nightingale, the Bursar, be suspected of secreting a crucial photograph, (the notebook in question passed through his hands first). Fact-finding does not end neatly, but rough justice prevails.

Snow's careful recital of the fictitious controversy and its solution is of great interest. The author's realistic appraisal of people and people's motives is called forth in this excellent work.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars no title, February 7, 2006

By 

C. L Wilson (Elmhurst, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Affair (Hardcover)

Well, he's back on track here, with a well-paced and interesting story set in Cambridge, as was "The Masters". Snow seems so at home there and writes marvelously of the Cambridge Fellows, most of whom appeared in the earlier book. I thought it a good choice to make Howard, the man accused of faking a photograph to prove his science, such a thoroughly unlikeable person, and thereby showing us a purer justice than if he had been someone whose company we enjoyed. The scales of Justice are blind, or should be so. I love reading about the ways and intrigues of Cambridge.

4.0 out of 5 stars Dreyfus Redux, November 26, 2011

By 

Stan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Affair (Strangers and Brothers) (Paperback)

Snow, not the most original of novelists, has recast the Dreyfus affair in a Cambridge college. There's the thoroughly unlikable young man (like Dreyfus, innocent but unpleasant verging on nasty) accused of treason to his calling as a scientist by falsifying data (like Dreyfus, the supposed traitor to France), loved and supported by members of his family (his wife in the novel, Dreyfus's brother and wife in real life), eventually exonerated by an upright man who passionately dislikes the accused man's beliefs (like Picquart, the antisemitic but honest officer who uncovered the truth at great sacrifice to himself), and finally the title of the novel, the name given to the Dreyfus affair by the French press. It was a fun read, and I recommend it.