A good deal of the remarkable popularity of C. P. Snow (both the highbrow Readers’ Subscription and the Book-of-the-Month Club have selected novels by Snow) can probably be accounted for by clarity: Snow is one of the few serious writers whose novels are relatively easy to read, or, to put it the other way, he is, like Dickens and Balzac, one of the few easy-to-read novelists who can also be taken seriously.
The reasons for Snow’s critical success, however, are not quite so simple. As a novelist he has considerable power and an all around competence rather than any outstanding single virtue. Technically he has made no particular contribution to the form of the novel; and while his novels display a high degree of intelligence and sensitivity, he is not to be defined by any single or easily identifiable set of ideas or attitudes. Snow’s critical success and his peculiar interest can be traced to the contemporary ideological vacuum, and, what is closely related to it, the tradition of the twentieth-century novel. Although our major intellectual tradition, liberalism, has been running down for a long time, and much of its honored spirit seems somewhat out of date, the attempts to fill the vacuum (such as the New Conservatism) have been pretty unconvincing. Hence we find ourselves in a secularized version of the Victorian predicament: we have lost or begun seriously to doubt our faith without having been able to find any adequate substitute.
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