Sophisticated Quest
The Conscience of the Rich. By C. P. Snow. (MaCmillan, 15s.)
THIS is the seventh book to appear in the Strangers and Brothers sequence, but chronologically it follows the first, Time of Hope, and indeed it repeats some of the incidents of that novel, with an effect of dela vu not unfamiliar to this novelist's readers. The period is 1929-36; Lewis Eliot is on the way up from Bar examinations to the Cam- bridge Fellowship, but we hear less about this suffering, unamiable young man than about the battle fought in a rich Jewish family for the soul of his friend Charles. March. Eliot sees at close quarters another tragedy of possessive love, and be sees men love power but renounce it—themes which recur later in the sequence and affect him more intimately. An author's note tells us that this book will make clearer the design of the sequence, which is 'a resonance between what Lewis Eliot sees and what he feels'; and little as we may like it, this is evidently true.
One has to ask why this deeply serious under- taking, for all its magnanimity and justice, for all its humane and devoted craftsmanship, is so clearly. hindered by some serious loss of power. One answer is the manner of the narration. The deliberate low tone of the prose is designed to record compassionate but unenchanted observa- tion, and it is very effective when it confronts one, without warning, with some brief tragic or comic splendour; it so obviously has no design on the truth. But the price is high; too much is, as it were, lost in the dark. All this may be said equally of the man who is supposed to titter this dark prose. The whole vast: narrative is, after all, the story of his quest—and probably any novel of this kind will turn out to be a variant of the Quest- tnotive—his quest for what lies 'beyond the vul-
garities of success.' When he has achieved it, he may radically change his reports on human character, which now seem remarkably limited. Still, he has his merits as a guide in the great world —he is, for example, divinely free of One—and we may congratulate ourselves that its inhabitants appear to like him so well that he is nearly always with them when some crisis occurs in their lives.
The Conscience' Of the Rich is mostly about the struggle between Charles March and his father. Charles (one of Lewis Eliot's failures I fear) is de- termined to be a good man; he throws up a promis- ing career as a barrister, marries an active Com- munist, also Jewish, and qualifies as a doctor, all against his father's wishes. Finally, in a well-con- trived climax, he is forced to choose between damaging his family, which is extremely powerful and clannish, and damaging his wife; or, to put it another way, between what his father requires and what he himself thinks proper. This inner sequence of events echoes others, more universal in applica- tion. The story moves largely from party to party, mostly rich gatherings of the clan; and whether the chips fly at dinner or in the library later, Eliot is there to see where they fall. It is curious, this clumsiness, especially in view of the professional skill of the dialogue—subtly directed to ethical and emotional climaxes—and the admirable tech- nique which, with little comment from Eliot, builds up Charles March's father into a fundamen- tally comic figure of the utmost 'seriousness and power, and one that almost seems to stand free from the demands of the plot itself. This makes, remarkably in so arranged a fiction, for surprise. There is something authentic about the shock we get when we see the old man wants his son's wife to die, and there are others like it.
Perhaps it is this power to convey what he cannot measure that justifies Lewis Eliot in the end. Perhaps when love and power have finished their experiment with him we shall find him also surprised and surprising. His creator will never give us that blaze of imaginative assurance that illuminates every part of .a great novel; and he has not the qualities which have, in the past, sus- tained fictions of great length—the obsessive slow march of Richardson, Proust's preoccupation with time itself. But for such surprises we must read on, and succumb again to that low, unemphatic
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