Books in Brief: The Sleep of Reason

The Sleep of Reason, by C. P. Snow (Scribner’s, $6.95). For one who is neither a reader of novels in general nor a devotee of Lord Snow in particular, reading this book is rather a peculiar experience. Nothing much seems to happen—the advertised murder of an eight-year-old boy by two Lesbians being for the most part a kind of machina ex diabolo for the introduction of a problem of loyalties—or if it does happen, it was (except for the murdering) going to happen sometime anyway: the plot is a peg on which to hang discussions. On the other hand, there is about the problems and discussions an air of having been resolved long ago, in the 1930s perhaps; no moral choices remain to be made, certainly not by the narrator’s generation. Yet the book is, curiously enough, pleasant reading, as autumn—whatever storms may disfigure it—is a pleasant time. Doubtless it is a tribute to Lord Snow that he can carry the reader, apparently effortlessly, over almost 500 pages of semi-narrative reflections on the passage of time and other subjects, even when the reader sometimes doubts, as I do, that all liberals and radicals, fellow travelers and unbelievers, are political good guys. Yet I must acknowledge that those who hold conservative views when they are unpopular should have sympathy (if not politically) for those who held liberal views when they were unpopular, assuming they were, and this particular blemish—if that is what it is—bothers me less than the fact that this book, since I have come late to Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, gives me the faint impression that I am overhearing, and only half understanding, an interesting but allusive conversation not intended for me.