The Master

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 892, 7 September 1956, Page 19

The Master

| ISTENING to C, P. Snow in the We Write Novels series, I was’ disappointed that his name was not J. Y. C. Betelgueuse, and that his interviewer, Walter Allen, was not, say, Winston Oriflamme, since each referred punctiliously to the other by his full name in the BBC manner, which amuses me vastly. "Tell me, C. P. Snow... ." "Well, Walter Allen .. ." My favourite one, of some years back, is an irate chairman saying testily: "Come, come, Malcolm Muggeridge! Surely C. E. M. Joad and C. A. Lejeune: you won’t lie down under that!" The BBC style of somewhere between familiarity and formality has always seemed clumsy. This apart, I like the sound of C. P. Snow, and his ten volume work, which seeks to explore the "Whole range of choices we have to make in a managerial society."’ His masters are Trollope and Stendhal, both, like himself, good civil servants. (Snow is a Commissioner of the Civil Service, and was formerly an atomic physicist.) Joyce set out to write "the whole palimpsest of himself,’ in Finnegan’s Wake, and for all I know, succeeded. Snow regards this as an end, and he is one of those who has made a new beginning in the novel of intimate social relations, reflected over twenty years through his recording, and experiencing eye, Lewis Elliott. His last novel but one, The Masters, which Walter Allen thought the best, takes as its action the election of dons in a Cambridge College, and manages to raise in this way the whole essence of politics, and the problems of power. Such novels should be written-full marks-and by whom better than senior and responsible civil _

servants?

B.E.G.

M.