The Sleep of Reason

Strangers and Brothers #10

by C.P. Snow

The penultimate novel in the 'Strangers and Brothers' series takes Goya's theme of monsters that appear in our sleep.

The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and sadism.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Literature, Novels, 20th Century

452 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Known British scientist Charles Percy Snow, baron Snow of Leicester, wrote especially his 11-volume series Strangers and Brothers (1940-1970).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the penultimate book in the chronological series, and yet it is the one most distant from where I am. It is set towards the end of the life of Lewis Eliot. He is now established, he is on his third career as a writer, and his children are now entering young manhood. He can afford to sit back and to be expansive. He has left the world of politics, although that world hasn't entirely left him, and he has a number of jobs to keep him occupied.

One of these jobs is on the court of the university of the town in which Eliot grew up. I spent a lot of time speculating about where that might be. My favourite is Loughborough, simply because of the associations which I have, albeit very tenuously, with that town. It is through this job that we find the three sub-plots of the novel - politics at the university, Eliot's father, and a curious case of child torture and murder.

The three are linked together in an interesting and novel way. Eliot takes the job at the university because he was asked by the student body, but also in order to maintain contact with his father. A lot here resonates with me. However, part of the consequences of this are that he has to become embroiled into the politics of the governing body. This comes to a head over the question of student discipline. That question highlights the fissures amongst the teaching staff between the traditionally minded and the modernists. This fissure is brought to a climax in the book.

One of the students involved in the question of student discipline introduces us to his sister, who also happens to be closely tied to another young woman who happens to be the niece of George Passant. These two young women, having abducted, tortured, and murdered a small boy, are tried during the novel. George Passant asks Eliot to keep an eye on his niece during the trial, which allows Eliot to visit the town more frequently than his university job would allow.

During these visits to the town, Eliot is able to visit his father more frequently. I had the impression that Eliot was reconnecting with his father, or, possibly, connecting for the first time. In any event, the father is a more central character in this novel. At the end, the young women are convicted of the abduction and murder, George Passant goes into a self-imposed exile, and old Mr Eliot dies. With this neat device, Snow severs all links between Eliot and his home town.

I think that one of the underlying themes of the book was how we draw boundaries for acceptable behaviour in an age that aims to be permissive. It is never a case that any behaviour can be acceptable. The question of student discipline revolves around a couple of young men staying over in a women's hostel. Today, there would be nothing seen as unusual in this. It represents the shift of morality. And yet, the pair of young women abduct and murder a small boy, which would never be seen as acceptable behaviour. The boundary has moved, but there still remains a boundary.

I find it hard to get into this line of thinking, which is why I found this to be the most difficult book of the series. It is written well, the story flows, and it has the elements of a well constructed whodunnit. On this level, it is well recommended. At a different level, I am still trying to see how that fits into the pattern of Lewis Eliot's life. Perhaps I never will?

[Robert Ronsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the tenth book in the Strangers and Brothers series and it has been an enlightening and worthwhile project to read them sequentially. I have commented before on the increasingly relaxed prose that makes the reading easier and also the divergence between this and the BBC-precise diction of the narrator Lewis Eliot’s peers who are now in their late fifties. These tendencies are even more evident here.
The novel was first published in 1968 and is set in 1963, when I entered my teenage years, and its dominant theme is that the proper order of things is about to be overwhelmed by the unreasonable freedom enjoyed by the generation born during the second world war. This is epitomised by its focus on the trial of two women in their late teens who inexplicably abduct and kill a young boy. The women are lesbians and one explanation offered for their crime (not by them) is guilt because of their ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour. (It is relevant that the first Moors Murder was committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in July 1963.)
I’m watching the latest series of Fargo at the moment and there is a scene where a lesbian couple who have escaped from prison are facing certain death. They object to being defined as criminals and want to be known as outlaws because criminals accept their part in the justice system but outlaws live beyond it. There is honour for them to die with their boots on. This chimed with a passage in this book where one of the defence lawyers described how his clients saw their deeds as an expression of ultimate freedom. Lewis Eliot continues: ‘It’s done a lot of harm, propoganda about freedom,’ said someone.
‘Freedom my arse,’ said the Clerk of assize with simpler eloquence.
I can’t help feeling that this was C P Snow’s view on the matter as well.
The principal weakness of the book is that Lewis Eliot feels compelled to attend the trial for no stronger reason than one of the accused is the niece of his oldest friend George Passant (he of the first book in the series) . This seems unlikely, as is Eliot’s connection to the niece’s accomplice’s family via a chance meeting with her brother. Perhaps his sense of obligation is something credible to his generation but unlikely now because of The Sleep of Reason.
One of the huge omissions of the book is any reference to popular culture. 1963 was the year The Beatles broke onto the scene. Bob Dylan would have been gestating the song The Times They Are a-Changin' (released In 1964). This is perhaps an indication of how those in the corridors of power and their children were vaguely aware of an impending social disruption but were insulated by class from the stirrings of its emergence.
One of the errors reviewers make is that we assume that a narrator’s views are those of the author and it is easy to fall into that trap here. (See my comment above about freedom.) Suffice to say that after reading the last book in this series I will be searching for a biography of CP Snow to determine how close his life was to that of his fictional alter ego.

Afterword: When I entered the title The Sleep of Reason into the Goodreads search engine to write this review, one of the titles that came up was The Sleep of Reason; the James Bulger Case. While reading this book, I could see that the murder in CP Snow's book was a fictional precursor for the deeply shocking abduction and murder by two 10-year-old boys in 1993. This clearly also occurred to the later book's author David James Smith. Perhaps it says something about our society that this crime, only just credible in fiction when committed by adults thirty years before, could happen in real life with such young perpetrators.

[Nick Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

A complete punt of a purchase (bought from a charity furniture shop I entered in error, expecting for there to be a bigger selection of books, slightly obliged I gave them 50p for this book which might just have been there for decoration) this wasn't completely dreadful, but overall I got less and less interested in it, and more and more sure that this wasn't my kind of thing, the longer it went on.

The novel follows Lewis Eliot, an esteemed man and university board member in the early 1960s, and his involvement in a number of storylines associated with changing social and moral landscapes, and personal changes too. Stylistically it is interestingly written, but in truth I found it stilted in places beyond the expected levels of a book written a half century ago. Eliot is involved with a disciplinary case where two student couples have been caught in a compromising position, and later in the book is asked to assist a family friend whose daughter has been accused (with her female friend/lover) of murdering a child. Morality forms a key theme in this book.

Alas, the overall effect of the book was that you could tell it was a late installment in a long series of novels focusing on the same people. Reading this as a stand-alone, I didn't particularly warm to the characters or their circumstances, and in a sense the novel felt like itself it contained five or six distinct but linked 'episodes' with a cliffhanger every sixty or so pages. This to me seemed like I had tuned in to an established drama series late in the canon and was missing out on most of the appeal as a consequence. It just felt hard going with aspects which a reader more invested in the characters would presumably have appreciated more.

Nevertheless, I did appreciate the intelligence of the writing and the author's trying to do what he was. Objectively this is good quality, but subjectively I only got a moderate amount of enjoyment from it.

[David]

My favourite of the sequence. Lots of bizarre violence examined through the perspective of a trial. More of a sense of unity in Lewis Eliot’s description of experience. Hard to explain why it works for me better than the others.

[Diana Lillig · Rating 3 out of 5]

C.P. Snow was a big deal in the 1950s and 1960s, starting with his exploration of the conflicting views and goals of traditional studies of classical literature and history (aka the humanities) and the sciences, which had become every more ascendant since the turn of the century. "The Two Cultures" was much discussed and was considered a groundbreaking work of near-sociology.

The Sleep of Reason is a novel that explores the final stages in careers and lives of a group of friends. Their fates are varied: some have succeeded in keeping pace with cultural changes, others have fallen out of synch with more modern attitudes and find their influence fading. In one case, youthful brilliance and free-thinking has fizzled into dingy failure but has unexpectedly contributed to a tragedy. Are the old, rigid values right? Are the newer, freer attitudes a slippery slope?

CP Snow explores these questions and intergenerational relationships with great sensitivity and does not offer any easy answers.

The book is the final volume in his series "Strangers and Brothers." It will be appreciated by those who enjoy the godlike ability to follow characters over decades. If you enjoyed Dance to the Music of Time, this will probably be of interest to you.

[Kevin Parsons · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is tough for me to rate this book - the longest one in the series if I am not mistaken. I go back and forth about whether this novel is dated or whether I am being overly influenced by the rather lurid book cover (for the Bantam paperback edition) and the associated back cover writeup. But it is more than just the subject matter of the main plot that gives me pause.

The book itself is not nearly as focused and tight as some of the earlier books in the series. But at the same time, since it deals with characters that I have been following through ten books now, I have no issue with either the length or the multiple story lines.

I go back and forth between 4 and 5 stars. I think for sheer focus and story, it is not to the level of "The Masters" or several other books in the series. But at the same time it is a thoughtful, intelligent and well written novel.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of C.P. Snow's novels. The description in Goodreads makes it sound horribly lurid, but in fact the murder is barely mentioned and has no impact on Lewis' life until his friend George comes and tells him that his (George's) niece is one of the accused and asks for his help, and that is past the middle of the book. So the trial figures prominently at the end of the book, but the discussions of responsibility and reason run throughout the whole.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The previous books in Snow's series have largely been stories about one person. There have been sub and side plots, of course, but the focus has been on a single narrative and an in-depth character analysis. This book, by contrast, at first feels episodic, as though Snow didn't really have a central idea. There's a row over a disciplinary case at University, an on-off unhappy love affair, a murder trial and, lastly, the death of the central character Lewis Eliot's eccentric father.

In fact Snow weaves the stories cleverly. They're loosely - sometimes a little too coincidentally - linked in plot and character terms, but are unified thematically. All the characters on whom Snow's attention rests are in their different ways unreasonable: stubborn and reactionary; unwilling to accept the reality of affairs of the heart; cruel and murderous; or simply unworldly and deluding themselves.

Good to see so practised a novelist still extending his craft so late in life, and at this late stage of a long-running series.

[Nathan Willard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’ve always liked Snow for the same reasons everyone agrees that Pamela Hansford Johnson was the better novelist of the pair. There’s something a little ponderous about his writing, which gives at least the illusion of emotional depth in a character that is too restrained by convention and position to exhibit it openly (though other characters will sometimes refer to it). The Sleep of Reason, the penultimate book in the Strangers and Brothers cycle, exhibits this tendency while connecting Lewis Eliot’s skill at academic wrangling, engagement with national policy, and his depth of feeling for his friends. It also serves as a final bookend to the formative experiences of his youth, as the bulk of the book is set in his old home town.

At the same time, I was drawn in by the academic intrigue of the first half of the novel, but less interested in the extended debate about individual responsibility that arises from a murder trial in the second half.

[John Bowis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is many years since I read and enjoyed the 'Strangers and Brothers' series of C P Snow but I had never read the tenth and last. At first I found the enclosed world of academia and the law rather irritating, not to say claustrophobic. Then, as the storyline developed I became enamoured, particularly when it covered the fear attached to eye treatment and then the trial scene and its impact on the interested observers.
Snow is also a preserver of language that is at risk of obsolescence. 'Hebetude' and 'Sunket' had me reaching for the dictionary but my favourite was 'Anthropocentrically' - a word to be treasured!

[Stuart Murden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Caught up with the CP Snow 'soap opera'. Generally a highly appreciated series but this volume didn't quite hit the mark for me.

[Margareth8537 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard going, but having got through the others you know the characters.
Preferred others such as the Masters, but with a long series there are always some which you prefer to others

[Ali Miremadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very moving. Always disturbing to read a story with such a serious crime at its heart. Lewis Eliot is a terrific character to follow through his life.

[Mikee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the tenth novel in the "Strangers and Brothers" series, and one of the best. The first part of the story meanders, as do they all, but this changes with the backdoor intruduction to The Crime and The Trial. Pretty damn intense. The story ends with some closings and some beginnings, but the whole book is suffused with bits of wisdom that make one stop and pause and think. Excellent writing.