[One] might say that [C. P. Snow] is a better novelist than he reads. While his prose is usually turgid and occasionally slipshod to the point of unintelligibility ("She was the opposite of hypochondria"), and while his outlook on men and their affairs seldom rises above a cynical shrewdness, he does try to deal with subjects that have engaged many of the better novelists during the past century and a half.

These include the drive for power by the unscrupulously ambitious and what it costs the rest of us; the clever games of status-seeking in a modern British society that remains obsessed with caste and class and protective of hereditary privilege even as it professes allegiance to democracy and the merit principle; the toll taken of the private self in a social climate where there is little relief from perpetual role-playing, little opportunity for people to "level" with...