Strangers and Brothers (2): The Masters, The New Men, Homecomings and The Affair

Abstract

The Masters, a compelling account of the struggle to elect a new Master of a Cambridge college, is Snow’s best-known and most critically esteemed novel. Within the ‘Strangers and Brothers’ series, it is the second of a ‘Cambridge’ trilogy which starts with The Light and the Dark and ends with The Affair. The Masters partly overlaps with The Light and the Dark, which covers the period 1934–43, but it is much more concentrated in terms of time, place and action, and its cast of characters is more exclusive. It spans one year, 1937, and confines itself wholly to Cambridge and mainly to key sites within a fictional, unnamed college: the combination-room, the courts, the sets of rooms of the individual dons, the Senior Tutor’s house (which is inside the college walls) and the Master’s Lodge. The action centres on the process of choosing the Master and refers only in passing to major events in The Light and the Dark, such as Roy Calvert’s affair with the Master’s daughter, Joan. The one significant character in The Masters from the wider world is Sir Horace Timberlake, a rich industrialist and possible benefactor of the college. This tight focus turns the college into a kind of laboratory where Lewis Eliot, as first-person narrator and participant-observer, can study the motives and behaviour of men engaged in the kind of ‘closed politics’ that Snow analyses in Science and Government, in which a small group makes crucial decisions (SG, 561).