C.P. Snow: The Dynamics of Hope 2012th Edition by N. Tredell (PDF)

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Novelist and cultural commentator C.P. Snow was a large and controversial presence in his lifetime but his work has been largely neglected since his death in 1980. This is the first 21st-century book to offer a clear, informed and sympathetic survey of all his novels and major non-fiction books and to affirm their importance for the world today.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I was very excited to see this new book on C.P. Snow, and applaud Nicolas Tredell for his recognition of the way that Snow has been both ignored and dismissed in recent years. Tredell’s approach of being “affirmative rather than apologetic” in his account of Snow is one that I welcome, and he is extremely meticulous in his claims and descriptions. This is particularly noteworthy because, as he points out in various places, those who have written about Snow have often been prone to making factual errors. Perhaps this is not surprising given the size of his output and, indeed, Snow himself sometimes made errors (e.g. in Last Things he misascribes one of Crawford’s habitual phrases to Pilbrow). In Tredell’s book I found no errors at all. Tredell also delves deep into Snow’s writings, even uncovering the early short stories which I had not been aware of before and have not seen discussed elsewhere. So this is a sympathetic, thorough and accurate assessment of Snow.The main disappointment for me is that far too much of the book is given over to summaries of Snow’s novels. Perhaps this will be useful for those unfamiliar with them, but it does mean that commentary and analysis – as opposed to summary – of the books is fairly limited in extent. Yes, there are passing discussions of style, recurring themes, motifs and so on, but no sustained argument. This problem is compounded by the fact that the novels are discussed one by one, rather than tackling (in particular) the Strangers and Brothers series as a whole. Yet, as Suguna Ramanathan argues in her earlier (1978) book, The Novels of C.P. Snow, it is only really from reading Strangers and Brothers as whole that the full depth of the writing and its meaning emerges with force. As an aside, Tredell mentions the Ramanathan book only twice, and in passing, yet to my mind it remains the best study to date of Snow’s main work.All of this means that `the dynamics of hope’ which are the subtitle of the book are not very well drawn. A better approach for doing so might have been to take the themes identified in Last Things (to paraphrase: the search for love; public life and ambition; progressive politics) as a vehicle to analyse the novel sequence as a whole. Within this, attention should be given to the interpretation offered by Ramanathan of Snow’s `darkening vision’, which runs counter to Tredell’s `dynamics of hope’ thesis. Indeed it is notable that Snow’s output was topped and tailed by two detective stories. In the first (Death Under Sail), in conventional fashion, the murderer is discovered; in the last (A Coat of Varnish, published just after Ramanathan’s book) there is no final resolution. That might be taken to symbolise the arc of a shift in Snow’s thinking away from rationality and optimism (from, as it were, a time of hope to the sleep of reason). Whatever the validity of that interpretation, my point is that the emphasis on book-by-book summaries means that Tredell does not go very deeply into these kinds of issues, and some kind of thematic approach might have been preferable.I also felt that one consequence of the sympathetic tone of the book was that the author revealed little of his own judgments. Whilst he summarises the critical response each book received he rarely gives a sense of his own preferences or assessments of the relative strengths of each book. Yet it is surely the case that, within the main series, some of the novels, notably George Passant in my view, are relatively weak; and outside the series The Malcontents, in particular, is (again in my view) actually quite poor. It is not necessary to be unsympathetic to or dismissive of Snow to make such judgments.To be fair, Tredell says at the outset that his intention is only to do “the groundwork” for a fuller re-appraisal of Snow, and that is fair enough. It is indeed remarkable that there is still no published full biography of so major a figure, even though several people have, apparently, embarked upon such a project. Tredell’s work will certainly provide a platform for that. Indeed, for me, the strongest chapters are the opening, biographical, one and the closing review of studies of Snow to date.I feel conscious of sounding rather harsh and it may be that I started out with too-high expectations for this book which may account for my curious dissatisfaction with it. But that dissatisfaction notwithstanding, it is refreshing to find an intelligent and sympathetic appraisal of this strangely neglected and (The Two Cultures aside, perhaps, which, for me anyway, was one of Snow’s least interesting works) almost forgotten writer.

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