A Compartmentalised Culture: Snow’s The Affaire

Charles Percy Snow’s novel The Affair (1960) is the eighth volume in his novel sequence (“roman fleuve”) Strangers and Brothers. The book concurs with the principle of unity of time, place and action in the sense that most of the action takes place at a Cambridge college, within a limited time frame (the period 1953–1954), and revolves around a delicate case of fraud. Lewis Eliot, a former college fellow and legal expert is invited to investigate the case and acts as first-person narrator. As a science novel, bridging the gap between literature and science, The Affair and other novels may be regarded (somewhat paradoxically perhaps) as a counterpart to Snow’s famous 1959 lecture The Two Cultures lamenting the gulf that exists between scientists and “literary intellectuals”, de facto bridged by these novels. He earned a Ph.D. in physics (spectroscopy) in Cambridge and became a Fellow of Christ’s College in 1930 before taking up his Strangers and Brothers sequence.