The Affair: Play (Acting Edition) Paperback – 28 Jun. 2016

IF YOU LIKE CP SNOW THIS BOOK IS A MUST. GREAT STORY AND WRITTEN IN HIS USUAL STYLE.

In The Affair, we are treated to the very best of Snow‘s characterization and character development.Maybe not the best book in the series, but in my top 3.

Good, if you like books written at this period, i.e.post war but a bit long winded for some.

This is the eighth novel in Snow's Strangers and Brothers Series and the last which is set in a fictional Cambridge college, the Cambridge ones being a series within the series. I began with Book 9, 'Corridors of Power', a phrase popularised by Snow before the novel was published. That led me to read the whole series and I have two more to go after 'The Affair'.All of the novels feature the life and career of the narrator, Lewis Eliot, starting with his childhood in a lower middle class family and charting his steady rise to power. The novels are set largely in 'upper class' milieux (including country houses! and are dialogue and character-driven, 'theatrical' in their restricted scenes. Their drama involves the tensions between characters. The backdrops are primarily lyrical descriptions of a London moving through different seasonal lighting, with wet leaves, mists, smells and so on.Although thematically the series deal with big issues - such as Suez and the creation of nuclear weapons - the essential focus is upon human interactions, these never without attending to those between men and women. It is at this level where the novels are best. We are given extremely well nuanced examinations of emotional lives shifting and sometimes converting, manifesting inner and outer conflicts, and states of being which offer an opportunity for us to recognise and identify with our human condition.Snow is a limited writer, each novel formally reproducing a basic pattern, and doing so well. Easy and pleasant reading and none the worse for that. Each novel stands alone but is enhanced by reading the series.

Worth reading