The sleep of reason

Fülszöveg

C. P. Snow has set The Sleep of Reason in the Midlands town where Lewis Eliot grew up and to which he returns from time to time in his capacity as Students' Representative on the University Court. He is no stranger to University politics, and if the students themselves are now a forcé to be reckoned with, the gambits and the stratagems are recognisably the same as they have always been in any competitive society.
He also comes to visit his father who still iives in the small house from which his two sons set out to compete in the outside world some 40 years ago. The oíd man, untouched by his sons' success, unmoved by the ties and tides of affection, steers his life skilfully through its last narrowing reaches, observed with anxiety and curiosity by his children and grand-children as if from the shore. But for Lewis Eliot, as he walks through the town after an evening visit to his father, accompanied by his own teen-aged son, there is no comfortable nostalgia. His involvement with... Tovább

Fülszöveg

C. P. Snow has set The Sleep of Reason in the Midlands town where Lewis Eliot grew up and to which he returns from time to time in his capacity as Students' Representative on the University Court. He is no stranger to University politics, and if the students themselves are now a forcé to be reckoned with, the gambits and the stratagems are recognisably the same as they have always been in any competitive society.
He also comes to visit his father who still iives in the small house from which his two sons set out to compete in the outside world some 40 years ago. The oíd man, untouched by his sons' success, unmoved by the ties and tides of affection, steers his life skilfully through its last narrowing reaches, observed with anxiety and curiosity by his children and grand-children as if from the shore. But for Lewis Eliot, as he walks through the town after an evening visit to his father, accompanied by his own teen-aged son, there is no comfortable nostalgia. His involvement with the case of a group of militant students, and in particular with the family of one Of them, leads him into a labyrinth of horror through which he must pass, incapable of influencing events or of resigning from them.
The horror arises from a murder trial in the town on which is focussed the hypnotised attention of the nation. From it emerges a series of portraits in shock; each of the people involved, to a greater or lesser extent, seems to
have frozen emotionally at a point where his consciousness and conscience will admit no more. As the triai draws to its conclusion, the paralysls passes, but the "return to normaley" is 'as fatuous a conception in this Context as it had been after a slaughter on a quite different scale 50 years before. No-one is unaffected. For George Passant (one of Lewis's oldest friends and responsible initiallyj for Lewis's involvement) watching some of his most passion-ately-hjeld libertarían principies coming sickeningly home to roost, for thejpsychopathic father of one of the défendants howling for "his rights'jin the public wilderness, for Eliot himself, painfully aware of the light and the dark, the edge of the pit seems jequally close.
Throudhout this brilliantly conceived and canstructed novel the reader is aware,iwith Eliot, of the loneliness of each individual in the crowd ; of the khread of reason which restraiips private fantasy from becoming public disaster ; of the limitations as well as the heroic horizons of the human spirit ; of the need fbr compassion and the
unsenfimental eye of love.

The Saeep of Reason is in itself a major iiovel. It is also a vital key to the meanifig of the whole Strangers and Brottiers sequence of novels.
Vissza