Name: Time Of Hope
ISBN: 9780755118526

C.P. Snow

Time of Hope is the third in the Strangers and Brothers series and tells the story of Lewis Eliot’s early life. As a child he is faced with his father’s bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds his career at the Bar hindered by a neurotic wife. Separation from her is impossible however.

Time Of Hope

Edwin Lang

Time of Hope covers a span of nineteen years, from 1914 to 1933. We meet Lewis Eliot, the protagonist in this 11-book series by C P Snow, on June 19, 1914, when he is ‘nearly nine’, amid trouble at home with his father going bankrupt. Eliot’s mother is a very strong woman, handsome, imperious, vain and a snob, mortified by her husband’s failure. She wanted three things from life: love, luxury and status and acknowledges that ‘she had married the wrong man’, and she inculcates in Lewis the importance of ambition and success. I like Time and Hope a lot because it is a wonderful depiction of what is, amid Lewis’ actually achieving his goals through superlatively hard work, in essence an unrequited love. Lewis nonetheless remains faithful to that love above all else. It is unrequited because the woman he falls for and remains in love with is psychologically incapable of returning love. Sheila is, as described by Lewis to a would-be lover of hers, ‘pathological and schizoid’, and yet she finds in Lewis someone she can trust. This story resembles Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. The difference though is that in Bondage, the young man Carey is in love with someone who is less crazy than simply evil. Here both Lewis Eliot and Sheila Knight know that she is broken, and yet that is not enough to break the bond they have with one another. So, this is principally a love story. Sheila Knight is actually an immensely beautiful woman, and has numerous affairs. It seems first an obsession of Lewis’, then something of a competition, and then, a punishment, as there is something of ‘I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along’. There is a moment when Lewis loses control and almost rapes Sheila, and it is one of the few moments where we see how ruthlessly ambitious he is. He muses some years later, after a tremendous humiliation, that ambition and vanity are intertwined. Lewis knows that he is ambitious after his mother’s urging, and somewhat ruthless as perhaps he had to be to raise himself from near-poverty in England. He had known Sheila for seven years, and had fallen in love with her immediately, perhaps simply because of her beauty. This was in England during the roaring twenties and what was something of time of sexual revolution, with Sheila in that milieu on an avid search for her true-love, or any man who could deeply satisfy her and make her feel alive. Even with Lewis, who among her many men she admired and trusted most, she was not satisfied. Much later – and this is a dark moment in the book - when she does seem to find someone, Hugh Smith whom she describes to Lewis as ‘it’s like finding a part of myself’, asking him, trusting him as she has always done, to vet Hugh for her and arrange things so ‘as to not lose him’. Lewis does this, and finds Hugh both wanting and paradoxically a source finally that might well truly bring Sheila the happiness she seeks. But his obsessive jealousy overcomes him and he consciously, almost gleefully, torpedoes the relationship. It is a difficult situation because as readers we know that she has, in her coldness and indifference, over the almost past seven years consistently hurt Lewis, and recognize to some degree that this is Lewis’ revenge. Ultimately though as Lewis hopes, but with something of a faint hope, Sheila finds her way back to him. The truth is, and this is something we and Lewis know, that Sheila will never find happiness. As he had brutally but honestly described to Hugh, that Sheila is loveless, crazy and will end up in a mad-house so, perhaps as in all C P Snow’s stories, it all unfolds as a complex characterization, an innately human one but with that quality I admire in his fiction: these persons are observed, in their goodness and badness, with judgment always withheld. Lewis and Sheila do marry, and then, Lewis having succeeded in finally possessing the love he had so long sought is now faced with this broken unresponsive and deeply unhappy person. Even sex is generally denied Lewis because Sheila feels and give so little; she is all take. The conundrum for Lewis then becomes what is he to do with his career for which he had struggled over for nearly two decades to prepare for, develop and is now on the cusp of reputational and monetary success. So, what does Lewis do? Illustrious and rewarding career, with status and money, or an exhausting life being a full-time caretaker, a ‘prisoner’ of this broken woman he had fallen in love with and had been so far unable to shake off with any application of reason or experience? The story is well and intricately developed, both in that quest for love and in personal aspirations. Edwin

Time Of Hope

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