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Strangers and Brothers #11
Last Things
The last in the 'Strangers and Brothers' series has Sir Lewis Eliot's heart stop briefly during an operation. During recovery he passes judgement on his achievements and dreams. Concerns fall from him leaving only ironic tolerance. His son Charles takes up his father's burdens and like his father, he is involved in the struggles of class and wealth, but he challenges the Establishment, risking his future in political activities.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
C.P. Snow
94 books124 followersKnown 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
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 11, 2021
I fell at the final fence! I negotiated the first ten books and was within 120 pages of the finishing line but I've given up.
The insurmountable obstacle was my increasing annoyance at the narrator Lewis Eliot. His solipsistic descriptions of those who interact with him and his dissection of their motivations finally overwhelmed me.
It reached peak level when Eliot's stepson and son were choosing their life partners. First, the younger, went to live with a divorcée who was older than him by five years and had a child. Eliot and his wife discussed how their son was 'wasting himself'.
Next they found out that the older son was going to marry someone who is handicapped. It turned out that she had a slight limp and her hearing was partially impaired. She also comes from the very poor although Eliot's wife denied this makes the slightest difference. Eliot had lived his life to get away from his humble beginnings and now his sons had let the side down and he spent pages agonising over what psychological deficiencies caused them to betray him.
Eliot throughout the Strangers and Brothers series has made a point of telling the reader that his world view was determined by coming from the lower middle class himself. But he has been consistent in turning a tin ear to the doings of the few ordinary people people he met while he was prowling the inner courts of his Cambridge college or Westminster's corridors of power.
I have mentioned before how one of the books was set in London during the first years of the 1940s yet there was no description of the blitz. The bombing clearly did not inconvenience Eliot, other than shortening the menu at his club, but was an issue for the huddled masses cowering in the underground stations somewhere out of his sight and cognition.
Similarly in 1966, Eliot told us that his new daughter-in-law, the poor one from Manchester, supported the United. In casting around for something to talk about he failed to remember that only a couple of months before the country had been in the grips of World Cup fever when England beat Germany in the final. One can only think that the round-ball game was not something that dented Eliot's ivory-tower existence.
Perhaps I shouldn't take this so personally, but Eliot (and his creator CP Snow) made much of his lowly beginnings and how this gave him an empathy not appreciated but those who have known nothing other than the benefits of high status he later enjoyed.
As I write this, I can see the fault in my logic. I am criticising the book because I've finally lost patience with its protagonist. The book is a fiction. What better compliment can I give to his creator than to detest the person that Lewis Eliot has become so much that I want nothing more to do with him.
Postscript: On totting up my Goodreads scores for all eleven books I calculate the average is 3.18. It's a fair reflection of the way I now feel about having (nearly) read the series.
The insurmountable obstacle was my increasing annoyance at the narrator Lewis Eliot. His solipsistic descriptions of those who interact with him and his dissection of their motivations finally overwhelmed me.
It reached peak level when Eliot's stepson and son were choosing their life partners. First, the younger, went to live with a divorcée who was older than him by five years and had a child. Eliot and his wife discussed how their son was 'wasting himself'.
Next they found out that the older son was going to marry someone who is handicapped. It turned out that she had a slight limp and her hearing was partially impaired. She also comes from the very poor although Eliot's wife denied this makes the slightest difference. Eliot had lived his life to get away from his humble beginnings and now his sons had let the side down and he spent pages agonising over what psychological deficiencies caused them to betray him.
Eliot throughout the Strangers and Brothers series has made a point of telling the reader that his world view was determined by coming from the lower middle class himself. But he has been consistent in turning a tin ear to the doings of the few ordinary people people he met while he was prowling the inner courts of his Cambridge college or Westminster's corridors of power.
I have mentioned before how one of the books was set in London during the first years of the 1940s yet there was no description of the blitz. The bombing clearly did not inconvenience Eliot, other than shortening the menu at his club, but was an issue for the huddled masses cowering in the underground stations somewhere out of his sight and cognition.
Similarly in 1966, Eliot told us that his new daughter-in-law, the poor one from Manchester, supported the United. In casting around for something to talk about he failed to remember that only a couple of months before the country had been in the grips of World Cup fever when England beat Germany in the final. One can only think that the round-ball game was not something that dented Eliot's ivory-tower existence.
Perhaps I shouldn't take this so personally, but Eliot (and his creator CP Snow) made much of his lowly beginnings and how this gave him an empathy not appreciated but those who have known nothing other than the benefits of high status he later enjoyed.
As I write this, I can see the fault in my logic. I am criticising the book because I've finally lost patience with its protagonist. The book is a fiction. What better compliment can I give to his creator than to detest the person that Lewis Eliot has become so much that I want nothing more to do with him.
Postscript: On totting up my Goodreads scores for all eleven books I calculate the average is 3.18. It's a fair reflection of the way I now feel about having (nearly) read the series.
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December 12, 2020The tone remains consistent as Lewis Eliot reaches the end of his narrative. In many ways, history begins to repeat itself in the next generation of the family. Cambridge, and the U.K. government, remain, despite many changes, fundamentally unchanged. I feel the same general sense that Snow—like Proust, Dorothy Richardson, and Hugh Hood (more or less in that order)—has been ultimately unable to free the narrator from the narrator’s own ego. For me, the less a sequence-novel narrator is focused inward, the better the long form reads. That, at any rate, is the conclusion reached after reading and/or re-reading 65 such books representing 6 such novel sequences this year.
December 26, 2014
I read the first C.P. Snow book Corridors of Power around 1975 when my then wife was doing English A level at night school. When working in Sudia Arabia in the early 80's I took the whole set of books and read during the six months I was there - the story has never left me such a good read that it was.
December 16, 2023
Having too much time on my hands I have read this year all of the 11 books in Snow's 'Strangers and Brothers' series, and the 12 books in Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time'. Here are thoughts on both series.
Powell's characters are more closely observed, yet as specimens. Yes they have altogether more plausible speech from which one could draw assumptions about their characters. Yet his observer Nicholas Jenkins remains somewhat at a distance. It is mentioned in passing that he marries, but his wife plays relatively little part in the story.
Compare with Snow. His characters are pretty much employed to speak as his hero Lewis Eliot (a thinly disguised Snow) speaks, often rather more portentously. But there is much more about his wives. The first marriage is near catastrophic because Sheila is mentally ill, and knowing this, Lewis marries her early in life. The second marriage, to Margaret, goes much better, though he nearly misses out. She, perhaps because Lewis's secret work makes him altogether too introverted, marries someone else and has a child by him. At the urging of friends he woos her and wins her back.
In my opinion, Lewis Eliot is a much stronger thread linking the series than is Nicolas Jenkins.
Snow's book deals with some big themes rather well. They include the rôle of science in government, and the the rôle of the law, and to a lesser extent religion, in society.
As someone else wrote on this site, there seems to be in each book someone on a self destructive course.
• George Passant inspires his younger contemporaries and incurs the suspicion of his contemporaries about his motives(not wholly unjustifiable)
• one of the March family incurs his father's wrath by giving up the law to study medicine
• a brilliant but depressive classicist essentially commits suicide by joining RAF Bomber Command
•several fellows at a Cambridge college go out on a limb to save the reputation of someone who may or may not be guilty of scientific fraud
• someone in charge of the British atom bomb project resigns because of possibly unwarranted moral concerns
• Lewis himself goes to some considerable trouble at risk to his health to save rather unworthy students from severe discipline
and so one.
FR Leavis in 1962 launched a hysterical rant (in my biased opinion) attacking Snow and all his works in the most intemperate terms. I think it was in large part a ludicrous over reaction to Snow's 'Two Cultures' talk, in which Snow savaged the wilful ignorance of science on the part of the literary establishment. In the short term it did Snow no harm at all. He continued to publish successful further books in the series until Last Things in 1970. His work was serialised on BBC Radio and Television. He got a peerage and served from 1964 to 1966 as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Technology.
In the longer term, 'Dance to the Music of Time' remains in print, and the 'Strangers and Brothers' series does not. But you can get both on Kindle. While I enjoyed both, I was more engaged by 'Strangers and Brothers.
Powell's characters are more closely observed, yet as specimens. Yes they have altogether more plausible speech from which one could draw assumptions about their characters. Yet his observer Nicholas Jenkins remains somewhat at a distance. It is mentioned in passing that he marries, but his wife plays relatively little part in the story.
Compare with Snow. His characters are pretty much employed to speak as his hero Lewis Eliot (a thinly disguised Snow) speaks, often rather more portentously. But there is much more about his wives. The first marriage is near catastrophic because Sheila is mentally ill, and knowing this, Lewis marries her early in life. The second marriage, to Margaret, goes much better, though he nearly misses out. She, perhaps because Lewis's secret work makes him altogether too introverted, marries someone else and has a child by him. At the urging of friends he woos her and wins her back.
In my opinion, Lewis Eliot is a much stronger thread linking the series than is Nicolas Jenkins.
Snow's book deals with some big themes rather well. They include the rôle of science in government, and the the rôle of the law, and to a lesser extent religion, in society.
As someone else wrote on this site, there seems to be in each book someone on a self destructive course.
• George Passant inspires his younger contemporaries and incurs the suspicion of his contemporaries about his motives(not wholly unjustifiable)
• one of the March family incurs his father's wrath by giving up the law to study medicine
• a brilliant but depressive classicist essentially commits suicide by joining RAF Bomber Command
•several fellows at a Cambridge college go out on a limb to save the reputation of someone who may or may not be guilty of scientific fraud
• someone in charge of the British atom bomb project resigns because of possibly unwarranted moral concerns
• Lewis himself goes to some considerable trouble at risk to his health to save rather unworthy students from severe discipline
and so one.
FR Leavis in 1962 launched a hysterical rant (in my biased opinion) attacking Snow and all his works in the most intemperate terms. I think it was in large part a ludicrous over reaction to Snow's 'Two Cultures' talk, in which Snow savaged the wilful ignorance of science on the part of the literary establishment. In the short term it did Snow no harm at all. He continued to publish successful further books in the series until Last Things in 1970. His work was serialised on BBC Radio and Television. He got a peerage and served from 1964 to 1966 as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Technology.
In the longer term, 'Dance to the Music of Time' remains in print, and the 'Strangers and Brothers' series does not. But you can get both on Kindle. While I enjoyed both, I was more engaged by 'Strangers and Brothers.
July 2, 2021
The last in Snow's epic 11-novel sequence and, sadly, by far the weakest. It feels as though the author didn't actually have a story in mind when he sat down to begin it. Others have followed the trials and travails of someone who deeply affected the life of Lewis Eliot, Snow's protagonist. Here - perhaps necessarily - Eliot is the focus as he steps away from his professional life and adjusts to his children leaving home. He decides not to accept a job in Government; and suffers eye trouble which requires surgery during which he has a cardiac arrest. In the last third, his son Charles is caught up in student unrest with extremist overtones which, ludicrously, leads to vetting interviews by senior officers from the security service. (Rehashing a subject already covered in The Malcontents, a non-series novel.)
There are still passages full of sensitivity and insight, for instance those connected with the illness and death of a lifelong friend, and those that deal with the helplessness of paternal love and the irritation caused by a nephew. But overall it fails to grip and convince me.
It's not entirely that Snow's written a bad book, though this isn't a good one. It's also not aged well. Others in the series have dealt with timeless themes and struggles while painting a marvellous picture of how life was in those years. Here, attitudes have dated: student political activism; how old a man is at 60; how formally family and close friends behave toward each other. The title itself, Last Things, feels inappropriate; today, for a professional in his or her early 60s, we'd be talking about a new career phase, about work-life balance, about what happens next.
Disappointing finale to a magnificent achievement.
There are still passages full of sensitivity and insight, for instance those connected with the illness and death of a lifelong friend, and those that deal with the helplessness of paternal love and the irritation caused by a nephew. But overall it fails to grip and convince me.
It's not entirely that Snow's written a bad book, though this isn't a good one. It's also not aged well. Others in the series have dealt with timeless themes and struggles while painting a marvellous picture of how life was in those years. Here, attitudes have dated: student political activism; how old a man is at 60; how formally family and close friends behave toward each other. The title itself, Last Things, feels inappropriate; today, for a professional in his or her early 60s, we'd be talking about a new career phase, about work-life balance, about what happens next.
Disappointing finale to a magnificent achievement.
October 1, 2020
This is the final instalment of CP Snow's epic, 11 volume, Strangers and Brothers series.
The individual novels are very much part of a series, with key characters being introduced one at a time. To avoid confusion and frustration, the novels need to be read in chronological order (which is not precisely the date order in which they were written).
CP Snow is not a writer for everyone. These books are not 'page turners' and there is not a plot per se. Instead, readers who appreciate an analysis of the 'human condition' (a la Graham Greene), and enjoy beautiful writing will have much to savour.
Although written over 50 years ago, the series remains just as relevant today - but perhaps even more so for men than women since Snow, and his protagonists, display much of the gender bias commonly in evidence in the mid-twentieth century.
The series helped me navigate the tedium of COVID19 lockdown and is thoroughly recommended. Just make sure you start at the beginning!
The individual novels are very much part of a series, with key characters being introduced one at a time. To avoid confusion and frustration, the novels need to be read in chronological order (which is not precisely the date order in which they were written).
CP Snow is not a writer for everyone. These books are not 'page turners' and there is not a plot per se. Instead, readers who appreciate an analysis of the 'human condition' (a la Graham Greene), and enjoy beautiful writing will have much to savour.
Although written over 50 years ago, the series remains just as relevant today - but perhaps even more so for men than women since Snow, and his protagonists, display much of the gender bias commonly in evidence in the mid-twentieth century.
The series helped me navigate the tedium of COVID19 lockdown and is thoroughly recommended. Just make sure you start at the beginning!
September 23, 2017
This is the last book of the wondrous Strangers and Brothers series, comprising eleven volumes spanning some 50 years in the life of Lewis Eliot, and written over a thirty year period. Last Things is about beginnings as well as endings and left me with an overpowering desire to reread the whole series again.
May 18, 2019
Sort of a novel of manners in that not much of anything happens. People die and get married and divorced. The narrator ruminates about life, death and his relationship with his college age son. Nicely written but you need to be in the right mood for these books.
December 23, 2022
Another great novel by C. P. Snow.
March 9, 2016
I have taken a long time to read this book. Partly this is because it is a complex book that ties up a lot of loose threads. Also, it is partly due to the book reaching a stage in the life of Lewis Eliot which roughly corresponds to where I am in my own life. I am thinking of my own last things.
On the face of it, the book is an intergenerational reflection. The focus is upon the early career of Lewis Eliot's son Charles. He manages to get into a scrape over the Official Secrets Act whilst at university. It could have been one of those incidents that could have taken a long time to shake off, but the whole matter was smoothed over and no lasting damage was done. As the drama unfolds, Eliot is allowed to reflect on his relationship with his son, and his own relationship with his father.
This resonates with me, as my children have only recently all left home and are starting to make their own lives. Eliot is concerned about his son Charles, and his step-son Maurice. In the end, Maurice is settled, whilst Charles starts his own life adventure. A bit like me, in that my daughters are now becoming settled, and my son is continuing his adventures in the Far East.
Francis Getliffe dies in this book. It is something of a shock, but is part of the topography of last things. I have reached an age where a number of my friends and contemporaries are proving not to be immortal. Loss of friends is quite different to loss of the preceding generations. In many respects, it reminds one of one's own mortality. It is a reminder that the clock ticks for all of us.
However, one of the things that I did like in the book was the sense of perspective that reflection on last things can give. Eliot, when offered a peerage, started to calculate how long he had left, and what he could usefully hope to achieve in that time. Eventually, he declined the peerage. Something that would be pretty uncommon nowadays. I have started to brood over this calculation myself. It is not only what could be achieved in the time available, but also whether one want's to achieve it. Personally, I have been ditching unrewarding commitments this Spring. I am not sure that the void - or space - created has been fully filled yet.
This is a good book to read as one moves from middle age into elderhood. It frames the possible in relation to capability. It certainly has had me thinking for months.
On the face of it, the book is an intergenerational reflection. The focus is upon the early career of Lewis Eliot's son Charles. He manages to get into a scrape over the Official Secrets Act whilst at university. It could have been one of those incidents that could have taken a long time to shake off, but the whole matter was smoothed over and no lasting damage was done. As the drama unfolds, Eliot is allowed to reflect on his relationship with his son, and his own relationship with his father.
This resonates with me, as my children have only recently all left home and are starting to make their own lives. Eliot is concerned about his son Charles, and his step-son Maurice. In the end, Maurice is settled, whilst Charles starts his own life adventure. A bit like me, in that my daughters are now becoming settled, and my son is continuing his adventures in the Far East.
Francis Getliffe dies in this book. It is something of a shock, but is part of the topography of last things. I have reached an age where a number of my friends and contemporaries are proving not to be immortal. Loss of friends is quite different to loss of the preceding generations. In many respects, it reminds one of one's own mortality. It is a reminder that the clock ticks for all of us.
However, one of the things that I did like in the book was the sense of perspective that reflection on last things can give. Eliot, when offered a peerage, started to calculate how long he had left, and what he could usefully hope to achieve in that time. Eventually, he declined the peerage. Something that would be pretty uncommon nowadays. I have started to brood over this calculation myself. It is not only what could be achieved in the time available, but also whether one want's to achieve it. Personally, I have been ditching unrewarding commitments this Spring. I am not sure that the void - or space - created has been fully filled yet.
This is a good book to read as one moves from middle age into elderhood. It frames the possible in relation to capability. It certainly has had me thinking for months.
September 3, 2016
I love CP Snow's writing and particularly the Strangers and Brother's series but this last book did not draw me in the way that the others in the series did. The younger characters were opaque and uninteresting. Disappointing.
June 27, 2015
I'm sad to say goodbye to Lewis Eliot and his world
September 11, 2025
It was a while since I read my last Snow, it was great to return to his world, I just find his thoughtful look at politics, academia and class so precise Igor England of the last century.
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