^#smrgSAHAF The Affair - 1960

The Affair is the eighth book in C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series. The events return to the Cambridge college of The Masters. It is once again narrated by Lewis Eliot.

Plot synopsis

The Affair is the story of a miscarriage of justice - set in the college of The Masters seventeen years later. A young scientist, whom no one specially likes, has been dismissed from his job. The matter has been kept secret, but all the twenty Fellows agree that he was guilty. Suddenly, in circumstances faintly like l'affaire Dreyfus (hence the title) a doubt springs up. Still in secret, the college is split into two, friend against friend, as one party tries to get justice done. This is not simply a struggle of good and evil. There are, as in all Snow's work, men of more or less good intentions, of mixed intentions, on both sides. Yet, as we read, enmeshed in the manceuvres, liking some men on the wrong side far more than the victim, we feel it is imperative that justice should be done.

The story is one of the most ingenious in the Strangers and Brothers sequence. ‘The men and women are as real, and as deeply perceived, as in any of these books. And there is an underlying theme with which Snow has been preoccupied before and now brings into the open —as he examines with affection the reasons why decent men can resist the claims of justice, and the reasons why less amiable ones can make sacrifices for it.