The Masters: (5 Strangers and Brothers)

Winner of 1954 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Widely regarded as C. P. Snow’s masterpiece, this lucid and compelling story of the contest for the Mastership of a Cambridge college is the fifth novel in C. P. Snow’s magnificent Strangers and Brothers sequence. As the old Master slowly dies of cancer, his colleagues and peers jostle for power. Two candidates come to the foreground; Paul Jago – warm and sympathetic, but given to extravagant moods and hindered by an unsuitable wife – and Crawford, a shrewd, cautious and reliable man who lacks any of Jago’s human gifts. For Lewis Eliot, through whose eyes the narrative unfurls, the choice is clear, but politics and egos soon cloud the debate and the College is torn in two. Depicting power in a confined setting with clarity and humanity, The Masters remains unsurpassed in its quiet, authoritative insight into the politics of academia. A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century.

About the Author :
C. P. Snow was born in Leicester in 1905 and educated at a secondary school. He started his career as a professional scientist, though writing was always his ultimate aim. He won a research scholarship to Cambridge and became a Fellow of his college in 1930. He continued his academic life there until the beginning of the Second World War, by which time he had already begun his masterwork – the eleven-volume Strangers and Brothers sequence, two of which (The Masters and The New Men) were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954. His other novels include The Search, The Malcontents and In Their Wisdom, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1974. Snow became a civil servant during the war and went on to become a Civil Service commissioner, for which he received a knighthood. He married a fellow novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson, in 1950 and delivered his famous lecture, The Two Cultures, that same year. C. P. Snow died in 1980.

Review :
The Masters stands out boldly as an achievement, lucid, compelling, ironical rather than tragic, generous in its fullness Perhaps the most engrossing academic novel in English This book confirms the opinion that Mr Snow is one of the three or four best novelists now writing in English Together, the sequence presents a vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life. Snow was that rare thing, a scientist and novelist Balzacian masterpieces of the age Through [the Strangers and Brothers sequence] as in no other work in our time we have explored the inner life of the new classless class that is the 20th century Establishment A very considerable achievement . . . It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope).