The Affair

Between 1940 and 1970, the British author, civil servant, and chemist C. P. Snow published an eleven-novel series called Strangers and Brothers, which is narrated by and built around the life of Lewis Eliot as he rises from obscure beginnings to become a London lawyer, Cambridge professor, and important government official. The Affair, which came out in 1960, is the eighth novel in this series, and it concerns Lewis’s return to his alma mater Cambridge University to navigate a socially complex issue as a consulting lawyer. With echoes of the real historical Dreyfus Affair (a famous turn-of-the-20th-century scandal in which an innocent Jewish French soldier was framed for the treason of a Catholic French officer), Snow’s The Affair features an unlikable scientist who has been unjustly accused of falsifying data.

In 1953, because Lewis Eliot is now an important member of the civil service and was once a fellow of a Cambridge College, he is approached in London by Laura Howard and Tom Orbell for help. Laura’s physicist husband, Donald Howard, has just been fired by the College after being accused of using a doctored photograph as scientific evidence. Howard is an outspoken Liberal and possibly even a communist, which put him at odds with the deeply conservative and Establishment professors who are in charge of the college. Since Eliot has some influence over the older fellows, could he right this wrong?

After meeting the thoroughly unpleasant Howard, Eliot is convinced the College committee acted appropriately. Howard insists that he used the photograph not knowing it was falsified. Instead, he claims that he found it in the research notes of a well-respected and recently dead College scientist. During dinner with his brother, Eliot learns that a younger fellow, Skeffington, has indeed found the same photograph in the work of this dead scholar. Skeffington convinces Eliot that the case against Howard should be reopened.



As he goes about trying to work on each individual fellow who is part of the College power structure, Lewis struggles with whether to be a “stranger” or a “brother” in this scenario – and in all of life. Strangers are loners, observers, and those who don’t want to involve themselves in other people’s lives, while brothers dive into interpersonal relationships. According to Lewis, strangers are outwardly more correct, but end up dead inside. As he decides to overcome his personal dislike of Howard to make sure that justice is served, Lewis lands on the “brother” side of the equation.

The novel is interested in the way the members of a powerful committee work to come to a decision. In this case, it is the group of fellows who comprise the power structure of the College. Through the efforts of Eliot, his brother, Skeffington, and a small group of sympathetic younger fellows, the case against Howard is again reopened and new evidence about the photograph comes to light. Because this new evidence implicates the College Bursar, Nightingale, of wrongdoing – or at least of negligent and malicious behavior, Howard is reinstated as a College fellow.

Since its publication, The Affair was adapted into a successful play in London. However, most reviews of the novel point out that it would be most deeply appreciated when read as part of the whole Strangers and Brothers series. Snow takes pains to bring back updated versions of previous characters and also to carry through his themes of power structures, interior versus exterior experiences, the psychological similarities of men in different social stations, and the impact of past events on present psychology. As Michael Milgate wrote when the novel first came out, “Snow, of course, is an extremely shrewd observer of men and society and The Affair, like his earlier novels, is full of comments and generalizations which appear casual but have in fact been long and deeply considered.”