THE SEARCH

C.P. Snow was a scientist before he was a novelist, so it's natural that this early novel would be about a scientist in crisis. Arthur Miles is a young gung-ho scientist who realizes he's made a mistake in his research, agonizes over the fact, and then quits. But he decides to help a friend, another scientist and the husband of his former lover. He is a careless, sloppy man, and Miles finds out that he, too, is making mistakes in his scientific work - only on purpose. Instead of ratting him out, however, he lets the mistakes go. Snow is an interesting writer who captures well the frustrations and moral uncertainties facing his characters. The decision that Miles makes at the end is not an easy one, and we even wonder if later on he might come to regret it. Snow's use of straight-forward narrative style is welcome in this day and age.

It is a work of fiction, written in a realistic manner, in the first person. The book is not part of the author's STRANGERS AND BROTHERS sequence. The narrator received the gift of a telescope from his father. He kept a record of his watchings, of the rings of Saturn, for example. His astronomical phase lasted for several years. A school teacher lectured on Bohr and Rutherford. The narrator, Arthur Miles, went home and read everything he could discover about atoms. This was when he determined to pursue a research career as a scientist. In general science in the school was an arid business. The teacher had lost heart, falling down over the strictures of the logical method of teaching science. Arthur's family was very poor. His father was the secretary of a small trade association. He had a happy childhood, reading widely in an eclectic way. Miles went up to Kings College, London. Others exceeded him in their theoretical grasp of systematic physics. He had friends, Hunt and Charles Sheriff. Charles and Arthur both needed to get firsts to pursue research. It was anticipated Hunt would be an economic pundit. Arthur learned crystallographic methods at the Royal Institution. The staff was good to him, an instance of scientific unselfishness. Subsequently he went to Cambridge and to Germany. He began to shift to becoming a science writer. Later he felt that he in a way repudaited science when he learned that his friend Charles Sheriff had committed scientific deception and he did not write to the journal in which the work was published with a correction. The account of personal and scholarly crises is absorbing and of great interest to the general reader. One tends to believe that Snow has portrayed the scientific world of his day accurately.