Customer Reviews

Strangers and Brothers

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I have read many series of novels - from The Forsyte Saga (Galsworthy) to Dance to the Music of Time (Powell), from The Raj Quartet (Scott) to The Alexandrine Quartet (Durrell). This is the best. It is the most profound, sensitive, deeply involving series of novels, set iun England from about 1920 through the mid-1960s, against the background of the small town where the barrister grew up, the university he attended and became a fellow, the world of nuclear physics during W.W.II (in which his brother is a scientist) and the related worlds of espionage involving nuclear secrets, Cabinet politics, and high business.

Snow's interests are many: obsessive love, the gaining and holding of power over others (politics in all sorts of worlds), manners, psychological infirmity. He is fascinated by the development and shredding of character and power. Warning: these books take about 150 pages to get into, so it does require patience. Once you are into the series, there is no satisfaction to be gained from any other book until the series is done. (My reaction when reading others is "why won't the author REALLY tell us what is happening in this scene?").

These books are truly great and truly under-appreciated. (The poor, overly reductive television series in the mid-1980s or early 1990s didn't help).

This is the first book in a series of wonderful novels by C.P.Snow.

Snow was a molecular physicist in England in the 1930-1940's. During world war II he became a civil servant, engaged in recruiting scientists to the war efforts, especially the development of the atomic bomb.

His books contain detailed observation of all levels of life in this setting; pre-world war II England (Strangers and Brothers), academic politics in Cambridge (The Masters), Whitehall politics (Corridors of Power) and the discovery of atomic power and the dread of its consequences (The New Men). All his books are woven with sensitive descriptions of his personal life and that of his friends. His first wife, suffering froms schizophrenia, had almost crippled him emotionally (Homecomings, A Time of Hope) untill he met his second wife who taught him to experience love and friendship.

His work as Civil Servant Commissioner and industry earned him a knighthood in 1957.

Stangers and Brothers is the first book, telling the story of Lewis Eliot (CP Snow's literary identity) and his encounter with George Passant between 1925-1933, who brought together a group of young people in an idealistic search for personal, social, and sexual freedom. It is a fascinating decription of social ideas typical of pre-world war II England, yet universal to young adulthood's search for independence.

I enjoyed almost all of Snow's books and I certainly recommend this one too. I sincerely wish all his books were available, but unfortunately many are out of press.

Set in a provincial English village, Strangers and Brothers was written in 1940 and is the first of a series featuring the protagonist Lewis Eliot. The main cast is a group of poor young college students who are mentored by one of their law professors, George Passant, a man of remarkable gifts who exerts a crucial influence on the lives of the young people he has gathered around himself.

Passant attracts the devotion of the group, and helps them with advice, lending them money and generally persuading them of their worth and motivating them to go on to greater things. He also parties with them. Eliot is one of the group who goes on to become a solicitor (lawyer).

Passant is a passionate, scrupulously honest idealist who is endlessly optimistic about human value and worth; a penchant that leads him into quixotic ventures, and eventually into trouble with the law on a fraud accusation, from which Lewis Elliot eventually extricates him.

The story is entirely about complex human motivations and relationships, with no violence, explicit sex, high speed auto chases or any of the other devices deemed so necessary by modern fiction writers. Yet it is fascinating, full of tension, and holds the reader's interest to the end.

C.P. Snow is also the author of The Search, The Affair, Homecoming and several other best selling novels of his day. This as a story that caught and held my interest.

Joseph H Pierre

I would join C. I. Wilson in his opinion about this volume. I also found it plodding and tedious. I finally gave up.

Somewhere this was recommended for me to read, but can't remember where. But I approached it with interest and was disappointed with the stories. My field is nuclear physics and the little bit of detail about the bomb development was interesting and helped me appreciate the conflicting emotions about it, especially the tragedy of its development and use over Japan. And the descriptive style of C. P. Snow is very good writing, but again, it just didn't grab my attention that other good novels have.

First book written in the series, written in 1940, but second in chronological order, "Time of Hope" being the first, starting in 1914, when Lewis Eliot is almost 9 years old. I started with "Time of Hope", thinking that since it was first in time, I should read it first. Perhaps that was a mistake, since I do not think "Strangers and Brothers" can hold a candle to "Time of Hope", written in 1949. That was a masterpeice, pure and simple. In "Strangers and Brothers" the narrative seems plodding, heavy, and at times downright preachy. And because I already knew that it was due mainly to George Passant alone that Lewis becomes the barrister he was, and the success that he was, the characterization of George by his trial lawyer as a man who has wasted his life seemed just plain wrong. No man who gives another man a chance he would never have had otherwise has wasted his life. He helped Lewis rise from his lower middle class beginnings with his prodding, encouragement, and most of all money, money that he had to take from those funds with which he regularly helped his parents. None of this is brought out in "Strangers and Brothers". But here too, as in "Time of Hope" is still that vagueness about what exactly George and Jack and Olive did that such a fuss was made about. All is implied; there are no scenes which take place telling us what happened. This did not hold me at all, and I found it tedious in spots. To be fair, I already knew that the three would be acquited from "Time of Hope", and maybe that colored my reading to some extent. Although to set the facts straight, Lewis was not the one who got George off; it was Getliff, his first employer when he was a young barrister.