Of Men and Decisions

CORRIDORS OF POWER by C. P. Snow. 403 pages. Scribner. $5.95.

"If a man hasn't the right to his own cliche, who has?" asks C. P. Snow in the preface to his latest novel. A good question, rougher than he apparently realized. For though Snow meant it to apply only to the title of Corridors of Power, which sneaked into print years before the book itself, the question spotlights the strength and weakness of his whole novel and of his entire Strangers and Brothers sequence, of which this is the ninth volume. Corridors of Power is the capstone of the sequence so far; it is on balance a very good novel, which nonetheless today seems in some ways unoriginal--but largely because of Snow's previous success in making his ideas into commonplaces.

The Game & the Stakes. For three decades now, the behind-the-scenes play of politics, personalities and principles in the British Establishment has been Sir Charles Percy Snow's chief subject and growing obsession, in both fiction and nonfiction. Himself thoroughly experienced both as a Cambridge scientist and a Whitehall administrator, he has made it disturbingly clear to millions that the motives of men of power are mixed and unpredictable, that even right decisions are often taken for trivial reasons, that even upright and intelligent men are often helpless to defeat inertia or change the results of the system.

This time out, Snow appears at first to be telling much the same story--and of course through the same narrator, the dispassionate and indestructible lawyer, Lewis Eliot, whose Cambridge and London career parallels Snow's own. A Tory politician named Roger Quaife is trying to alter radically the course of defense policy in the late 1950s by persuading a Tory government to scrap Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, which he sees as ineffective, ruinously expensive, and a dangerous temptation to other small powers to compete in the atomic arms race. Quaife is a tough, experienced and well-connected Member of Parliament, clearly brilliant, ravenously ambitious but secretly something more: an idealist seeking a justification beyond power and a prize in the history books beyond the usual rewards of playing ambition's game. He is the most enigmatically attractive figure Snow has ever drawn.

The Gamble. By ruthless intriguing, Quaife displaces an aging Minister and takes over the Cabinet portfolio that includes policymaking on the nuclear deterrent. By a considerable amount of flattery and deception he isolates the scientific enemies of his viewpoint, by wheeling and dealing he splits the industrialists who stand to lose lucrative defense contracts, and by magnetism and grit he puts together a precarious grouping of Cabinet members, senior civil servants and Tory backbenchers in support of a White Paper that outlines the first steps away from the nuclear arms race.

Quaife's game is desperately exciting, well played, and in the end not quite enough. Offered a chance to back down gracefully and conserve his power, Quaife instead gambles everything--and loses everything when he is not able to hold the solid support of his own party members in Parliament.

Losses & Winnings. There are many reasons for his losing, Snow suggests. Quaife tried too much, too fast, too young. He advanced his policy (which Snow clearly thinks is good and has in fact been urging publicly for years) a decade too early for a party still reluctant to accept the meaning and the political consequences of the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. There was a hint of scandal over a mistress. He was sandbagged by civil servants, deserted by a key Tory supporter grown jealous of his success. But in the end, Narrator Eliot makes clear, there was no one reason for his defeat.

It is also clear that Author Snow has gambled and won. His narrative style still ticks along like a metronome, and his characters still seem sometimes to move with the other-worldly pace of tropical fish seen through a glass-bottomed boat. But Snow has succeeded in transforming his own cliches about the men and ways of power in modern Britain: by the sweeping scope of the issue and the struggle, the strength of Roger Quaife, the accuracy of observation and dialogue and the disturbing pertinence of the questions, Snow has brought off a compelling novel of high politics.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.