Generation on Trial

THE SLEEP OF REASON by C.P. Snow 483 pages. Scribners. $6.95.

The Sleep of Reason is the tenth of the Strangers and Brothers novels, Lord Snow's melancholy, quasi-autobiographical saga of the rise of Lewis Eliot from lower-middle-class obscurity to knighthood. In many of the previous novels, Sir Lewis' empirical eye focused acutely on the intricate and polished parquetry of the English Establishment as he proceeded through the corridors of power. In The Sleep of Reason, that same cool eye is cast on more amorphous matters as the author struggles with formulations about such things as free will, responsibility and human nature. Recently C. P. Snow informed the press that the eleventh and final Strangers and Brothers novel will deal with "death, judgment, heaven and hell." If The Sleep of Reason is any indication of Snow's ability to deal with speculative issues in fiction, the next novel will prove a rather tedious and drawn-out farewell to Lewis Eliot.

Pawn en Passant. The central event that impinges on the well-earned satisfactions of Eliot's Indian-summer years is the sadistic murder of an eight-year-old boy by a lesbian couple. This grisly action greatly resembles the Moors murder case, described in 1967 by Snow's novelist wife Pamela Hansford Johnson in a short book of moralizing social criticism called On Iniquity. Trying to match modified reality with near-art, Snow contrives to have Eliot drawn into the murder's aftermath and the murderers' trial through a series of unconvincing coincidences. The brother of one of the killers is a college student who is involved in a sex scandal requiring disciplinary action by the school board on which Eliot sits as a member. More important to Snow's long experiment in linked fiction, the other accused woman is the niece of George Passant, Eliot's old friend and the central figure of Strangers and Brothers (1940), the first novel in the sequence.

In the series, Passant serves in a philosophical role (familiar in conventional success stories) as "the better man" whom the hero admired in youth and never quite outgrew or forgot. At the cost of his own career Passant helped struggling young people around him (including Eliot), saving them from stagnation by creating an intellectual coterie. He also preached freedom and self-expression--against the narrow restraints of provincial England in the late 1920s. Eliot's attitude toward Passant in the first book became fondly equivocal, for he served as a continual reminder that certain kinds of selflessness, though admirable, are self-destructive. Folded into this late volume, Passant is made to stand for something more. Eliot sees the dreadful crime under examination at least partly as the result of an innocent addiction to humanist hopefulness about man, along with the corollary doctrine of unfettered personal freedom--both typical of Passant's thinking. During the trial of the two young harpies a nostalgic form of liberalism is also being weighed--and to a large extent found wanting.

With unimpeachable acumen, Snow has thus chosen a minor theme close to the central preoccupations of the times. He has also chosen a major crime whose details are sure to titillate and open the doors to a number of fashionable speculations--about the crime of punishment, about the existence of evil and the nature of man. Working them thematically for all they are worth, Snow has produced a book that is bound to provoke a great deal of reflection--but that is also a very bad novel.

Forward Observer. This is not new for Snow, who has always evaded the unutterably difficult process of fictional creation, partly by projecting his alter ego into his books as a central character, partly by believing as Wordsworth did that the story of men's lives can be made passionately interesting by the mere assertion that it is so. In The Sleep of Reason, despite Snow's best efforts, Eliot remains a mere observer. For though Eliot never permits himself the indulgence of easy indignation over the crime, he cannily refuses to press thought to its extremes. He ends by acknowledging that his experience has induced him to believe in "something like original sin." Even in context, this comes off little better than the tag end of a sententious newspaper editorial.

Significantly, one of the few places where the novel threatens to break through and touch Eliot's life (and the reader's) in some recognizably profound and moving way occurs as he ponders a discussion he is having with his wife Margaret about the crime, and likens it to an earlier conversation he had with one of the murderers. "There had been questions pounding behind my tongue . . . What did she do? What did they say to each other? What was it like to do it? For me in the jail, for Margaret in our drawing room, those questions boiled up: out of a curiosity which was passionate, insistent, human and at the same time corrupt."

Snow simply states that such sticky complications exist, rather than going through the creative effort of portraying them dramatically. Yet Eliot, as always, emerges as the one character of considerable authenticity. Most likely this is because he contains so many of Snow's own convictions and so much of Snow's concern for the future of the race. Montaigne once said, "I am myself the subject of my works," and for an essayist that was enough. It is not enough for a novelist. In The Sleep of Reason, Eliot seems motivated largely by Snow's need to have him in a particular place at a particular moment in order to function as a fictional forward observer. It is an excessively willful way to construct fiction, but perfectly in keeping with the motto on Lord Snow's coat of arms: Aut inveniam viam aut faciam--"I shall either find a way or make one."

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