The Masters

Another terrific book , supposedly the best in the series ("Strangers and Brothers"), but I think that several others are possibly better. And, really, it ends so dismally. Although I guess any other way would be too trite, and I'm quite sure that this is based on some real event in Snow's life, as I feel all the books are. The dons are all so sharply drawn, each clear in his own character. And the eating and drinking they constantly did! I guess they walked a lot. I loved it. The intrigues and politics that Snow writes about, are worthy of any Washington lobbyist. Except that here we are at Cambridge.

I'd urge you to read this one. Few people describe the inner life of men, or at least his class of 20th century Englishman, so well as Snow. The characterisations are the strength, all vanities and motivations probed as if by a surgeon, though the "closed" politics plot is entertaining enough. Other reviewers list their favourite characters, I'd plump for Winslow and Brown myself. Beautiful writing style.

C.P.Snow has some fine qualities; he is succinct, perceptive and astute. This novel, perhaps to a greater extent than any of his others, reflects these qualities as "The Masters" is a triumph of characterisation. Jago, Brown, Calvert, Nightingale and Gay will live long in the memory and the understated way in which Snow brings them to life is most adroit. Ultimately, however, like all of the Strangers and Brothers sequence, it is a novel about the narrator, Lewis Eliot; the relationship between tale and teller here is particularly impressive. The reader becomes unconsciously embroiled in and fascinated by his life - here is a narrator who is both partial and impartial, intense and detached. The claustrophobic, parochial and insular world of academic life is captured perfectly here. I recommend it highly; for anyone who has read it and enjoyed it, I commend to their attention "The Affair" by the same author. Set in the same Cambridge college, many of the characters reappear and it is another very fine read.

A novel set in the intimate, closed world of a school or college (or a convent, or cathedral close) has a better-than-average chance of being fascinating to begin with. Whether a school story is a work of literary art such as Snow's The Masters or Antonia White's Frost in May, a decent novel in the vein of Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days, Kipling's Stalky and Co., or Farrar's Eric, or even the kind of boarding-school story churned out by the likes of Angela Brazil and the author of the Greycliff series, school stories tend to hold one's interest because they are school stories. Generally written by one with insider knowledge, such books seem to reveal not only the characteristics of a society in microcosm, but also the particular stresses and strains imposed by intimate, closed worlds. Snow's The Masters is perhaps the supreme example of this genre. A perfectly plotted and self-contained novel filled with unforgettable characters (Mrs. Jago, the embittered Despard-Smith and the beautifully-realized Professor M. H. L. Gay come to mind), The Masters is certainly C.P. Snow's best work. Snow's college world is no ivory tower. Passions and ruthless hatreds surface as two factions clash over the election of a new Master of a Cambridge college. The power brokers Chrystal and Brown display their practiced adroitness as they machinate to put their candidate in office and angle for a major benefaction from a wealthy industrialist. Political overtones from the outside world (the novel is set iduring the period of Hitler's rise to power) begin to agitate the election question further. This is a novel to read again and again.

The Masters concerns an election of the head of a college in England by the masters (professors) at the school. Snow skillfully illustrates to us the politics of small groups, and how very different those politics are from politics in a broader sense. This book is one of the Strangers and Brothers series, but it reads very nicely as a stand-alone work. The Masters is a good read, in which we follow the partisan manuvering of two factions seeking different candidates in the school election. Snow's style is straightforward, almost a latter-day Trollope, and his ideas are very insightful. This is a classic, which deserves to be more read.