Modern Polonius

TIME OF HOPE (408 pp.); THE LIGHT AND THE DARK (406 pp.)--C. P. Snow--Scribner ($4.95).

C. P. Snow is devoted to the top-secret novel. His characters do not meet, they rendezvous. Even their platitudes are guarded. They discuss the time of day as if it were classified information. This conspiratorial mode apparently suits Charles Percy Snow, who seems to view life as a vast intrigue in which men endlessly scheme for everything, from women and wealth to positions of academic, bureaucratic and managerial power.

The Light and the Dark and Time of Hope are the second and third novels in Snow's panoramic cycle (eight volumes to date) of British life from World War I to the present. There are no "new men" in these two books, and none of those reflections on the rift between the "two cultures," scientific and humanist, that have recently catapulted Snow into the role of a space-age sage. But the hero and narrator is, as always, Lewis Eliot--a wily courtier of success, in law, college, and government administration, and a kind of modern Polonius.

To Self-Destruction. In Hamlet, worldly-wise Polonius gets everything wrong but is never at a loss for plausible hypotheses or cagey tactics. Lewis Eliot is only half wrong in these novels, but that half blights his personal life. His wife and his best friend take parallel roads to self-destruction.

Time of Hope begins in 1914, when Lewis is nearly nine, the son of a hawk-proud mother and a run-rabbit father who fetches up in bankruptcy court. Lewis is soon left with an aunt's legacy of -L-300 and his mother's dying injunction to make something of himself. Almost awed by his presumption, he decides to be a lawyer, and it becomes a question of which will give out first--his money, his marks, or his health. Sheer grit gets him to the Inns of Court.

Then he tackles a case too tangled for any brief. Sheila is a shimmeringly lovely, self-centered neurotic. The pain of their dissonant relationship becomes his joyless pleasure. Yet at novel's end, unhappiness binds them ever more tightly, having awakened a mutual profound pity.

The Need for God. In The Light and the Dark Lewis continues to suffer, but from the sidelines. The setting is Cambridge, where, in the '30s, Lewis has become an academic cog. The central figure is Roy Calvert--a brilliant, rich, erratically humored young Orientalist who is decoding an ancient language called Early Soghdian. The first crisis is whether Calvert is to be elected a fellow of the college. In one of those vendettas of common room and high table that no one describes with more authoritative relish than C. P. Snow, Calvert squeaks through. But Roy is prey to manic-depressive demons, and he is tortured by his need "for the authority of God." Neither heavy drink nor light promiscuity can help him. For a time he flirts with Hitlerism, seeking the force that is lacking in effete British aristocrats who seem played out even beyond the demands of satire. But when war comes, Roy enlists in the R.A.F. and finds a hero's rest. Essentially, The Light and the Dark is a thesis novel designed to prove that a man's nature predestines his end.

The taste of the late 1940s in neglecting these novels on original publication may have been sound, for Snow's characters are the sort who disappear the minute the author takes his eyes off them. Even cultists who cozy up with these 814 pages may find themselves merely Snowbound and Snowblind. And yet Snow seems to touch a nerve in 20th century readers--perhaps because he evokes with easy assurance the intellectual and social history of the '20s and '30s; or perhaps because his concept of life as a conspiracy in quest of power has a timeliness and meaning that even the most dawdling prose cannot wholly obscure.

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