Modern English and American literature

The novel is an illustration of one of Maugham's favourite convictions that human nature is a knit of contradictions, that the workings of the human mind are unpredictable. Strickland is concentrated on his art. He is indifferent to love, friendship and kindness, and inconsiderate to others. He ruins the life of Dirk Stroeve and his wife who nursed him when he was dangerously ill. He does not care for his own wife and children and brings misfortune to all the people who come in touch with him. But on the other hand we cannot deny his talent as an artist, a creator of beauty. His passionate devotion to art arouses the readers' admiration. Strickland cannot help acting according to his nature, and he cannot care for anything else but art as art is the only means for him to express himself.

Society, however, is hardly ever tolerant and patient with geniuses. Most often a genius has to die before he is acknowledged. Maugham shows how blind the bourgeois public is to real beauty. Later Strickland's works are bought by the public because it is fashionable to have them in one's flat. The author mocks at the Philistines represented by Mrs. Strickland who has hated her husband so long. Now she finds his paintings a great consolation for they are so decorative.

Another important character of the novel, Dirk Stroeve is shown as an antipode to Strickland. He is a very kind man, but a bad artist, though he possesses a keen sense of beauty and is the first to appreciate Strickland's talent. Stroeve paints easily and is able to cater for the vulgar tastes of the public. The author shows that the public lacks sensitivity and imagination therefore real art is as unattainable for the rich as the moon is. The title served to Maugham as a symbol for two opposing worlds - the material world quit by Strickland, where everything is thought of in terms of money and the world of pure artistry and craving for beauty.

Richard Aldington

1892-1962

Richard Aldington was born in the family of a solicitor at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England on July 8, 1892. He was educated for four years at Dover College and at London University, but did not complete his education at the university because of financial problems of the family. But he provided himself with the informal education due to his father's excellent library, and studying with his older friend Dudley Grey who was a classical scholar and a traveller.

He was writing (chiefly verse) from about the age of fifteen and never considered any profession except writing. In 1913 he became literary editor of the Egoist whose sponsors were of the same group that later introduced Imagism - a group of poets whose chief concern was “to produce a lasting image”. They sought “absolute freedom of form”. This literary trend arose in England in the first quarter of the XX century, as a protest against abstract poetry.

In 1916, at the age of twenty-four, Aldington entered World War I as a private in the infantry, later becoming an officer. His two and a half year active duty during the war influenced greatly upon his further literary career. However, he had to leave the army with a bad case of shell shock. For some time he worked at The Times literary supplement, reviewing French books. At the same time he translated from Italian and Latin and made his living by criticism. During this time he managed to publish four volumes of poetry which attracted the attention of the leading literary circles. However, he dropped his creative writing in verse to devote all his attention to prose. He lived for varying periods in Italy, France and Switzerland and later settled on the Riviera, where he lived until the outbreak of World War II. Then he went to the USA where he lived for the rest of his life.

War greatly influenced his world outlook and brought him to regard the duty of a writer in a new light. He broke away from decadence and came to appreciate only those books which were written “out of a man's guts” and showed life as it really was. Few novels are more biting in their analysis or more indignant in their presentation than the Death of a Hero (1929) and The Colonel's Daughter (1931).

Aldington's other principal works include: Images Old and New (a book in verse, 1915), Roads to Glory (short stories, 1930), Soft Answers (novelettes, 1932), All Men Are Enemies (a novel, 1933), Life of a Lady (his only play, 1936), Life for Life's Sake (autobiography, 1941), Portrait of a Genius (a biography of D.H. Lawrence, 1950).

Death of a Hero, dedicated to the so-called “lost generation”, is Aldington's first and most important novel. Containing a passionate protest against both war and the rotten order of things in his own country, it displays English intellectual and social life before and during World War I.

The book opens with a prologue about George Winterbourne's death.

“George was killed soon after dawn on the 4th November, 1918, at a place called Maison Blanche. ...He was the only officer in his battalion killed in that action, for the Germans surrendered or ran away in less than an hour... The whole of his company were lying down waiting for the flying trench-mortar squad to deal with the machine-gun, when for some unexplained reason George had stood up and a dozen bullets had gone through him. “Silly ass”, was the Colonel's comment....”

The author describes how Winterbourne's relatives receive the news from the War Office which runs - “regret to inform ... killed in action ... Their Majesty's sympathy...” The telegram “went to the home address in the country, and was opened by Mrs. Winrebourne. Such an excitement for her, almost a pleasant change, for it was pretty dull in the country just after the Armistice. She was sitting by the fire, yawning over her twenty-second lover... Mrs. Winterbourne liked drama in private life. She uttered a most creditable shriek, clasped both hands to her rather soggy bosom, and pretended to faint. ...But the effect of George's death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic.”

We get acquainted with the main characters of the book: George Winterbourne's parents, his wife Elizabeth, his mistress Fanny and George's friend who is the bearer of Aldington's views and comments as well. “Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvelous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar.” “At the fatal news Mr.Winterbourne had fallen upon his knees (not forgetting, however, to ring off the harpy)”.

From the very beginning Aldington exposes the moral standards of bourgeois society. The first part of the book opens, after the break of the news about George's death, with characteristics of Victorian England about the year 1890. The author tells about George's parents, a petty bourgeois family and a very different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. An England morally buried in great foggy mappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still moody, still under the Golden Rule of “Ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern”.

In the second part the narrator tells us through many flashbacks about George Winterbourne's life. The author dwells on family relations, love, modern art and criticizes mercilessly modern capitalist society and civilization.

The third part of the novel is entirely devoted to George's Active Service on the Continent - mainly in France. Here Aldington gives a truthful picture of World War I. He does not describe much the trenches and soldiers in the war. Nevertheless we see the senselessness of the war and fully agree with the author that millions of people are killed for nothing. George suffers at the feeling that his body has become worthless, condemned to a sort of kept tramp's standard of living and ruthlessly treated as cannon-fodder. He suffers for other men too, that they should be condemned to this; but since it was common fate of the men of his generation he determines he must endure it.

If at the beginning of the book we learn about George's death as told by his commander, a colonel, so at the end of the book we get to know about the last minutes of George Winterbourne's life.

The title of the book Death of a Hero is ironical. There was nothing heroic in George Winterbourne's death, it was quite useless and senseless. “I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don't mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing” says George's friend ... “Something seemed to break in Winterbourne's head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.”

Aldington called his book a song of lamentation for the dead of the generation that went through the horrors of the war, “a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly and suffered deeply.”

Archibald Joseph Cronin

1896-1981

A.J. Cronin is a representative of realism in contemporary English literature. He criticized various negative sides of bourgeois England, such as medical service, the life of the coalminers and the system of education.

Cronin, a Scottish novelist and physician, was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, the only child of a working class family. His father was Catholic and his mother was from a strongly Protestant family. He became fatherless very early and was educated at Dumbarton Academy at the expense of his uncle. During his school years he took great interest in literature. At the age of thirteen he won a gold medal in a nation-wide competition for the best historical essay of the year. He grew away from religion and realized his own dream of brotherhood between people of different churches. This spirit of conciliation marked all his books dealing with questions of faith.

His love for natural sciences got the upper hand and in 1914 Cronin began to study medicine at Glasgow University. His studies were interrupted by war service in the navy. However, in 1919 he graduated from the university with honours. Then he embarked as ship's surgeon on a liner bound for India. Various hospital appointments followed later.

In 1921 he married and commenced practice in South Wales, where he got acquainted with the coalminers, their conditions of life, and their hard work. While working there he took two higher medical degrees. In 1924 he was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines. In 1925 he was awarded with M. D. honours by the University of Glasgow. Subsequently he started working as a doctor in the West End of London, where he amassed a large practice.

But in 1930 his health broke down, and while convalescing in the West Highlands of Scotland he turned to writing and started to write his first novel Hatter's Castle, which was published in 1931 and very soon translated into 5 languages and was filmed in 1941.

Hatter's Castle. The novel was an instantaneous success, and was highly estimated both by critics and readers. The writer has created an impressive character of Mr. James Brodie, a tyrant to his family - his wife Margaret and his children Matthew, Mary and Nessie. Margaret, who was once beautiful and gay, was just a piece of property to Brodie. Even if he seems to love someone - this is a strange love of an egoist. This concerns his younger daughter Nessie whom he made a physical and moral ruin. Their daughter Mary is a contrast to both her father and her mother. She strives for happiness and she is brave and decisive. She doesn't fear Mr. Brodie and she is always ready to defend her younger sister whom she loves dearly. When Mr. Brodie gets to know about Mary's relations with Denis Foyle and her pregnancy he drives her away from home. He never mentions her by name, he calls her “the one I kicked out of my home”. Mary is homeless and helpless. But her hope of life is Denis, the father of her future child. Unfortunately, at the moment when Mary is giving birth to her child her beloved Denis parishes when the storm breaks out and the lightning strikes the train right on the bridge. Mary returns home but she is neglected by her father. She tries to care about him and to please him although he is not the man who can appreciate it. He drives his little daughter Nessie to despair and suicide. He wanted her to be always top of the class and win the Latta scholarship. He always threatened to kill her if she didn't win. Nessie did not win the Latta competition and she knew what that meant for the ambitious man like her father and she committed suicide. Mr.Brodie sent his son Matthew to India, but instead of earning money there Matthew demanded money from his mother, and she sold and mortgaged everything she could, concealing it from her husband, to send Matthew 40 pounds. Eventually, Matthew left for America taking his father's mistress Nancy with him.

After the publication of his first novel Cronin determined to devote himself to literature, for all his life he had been intensely interested in the world of letters. In 1935 the novel The Stars Look Down appeared. In a short time it gained popularity both in Europe and America, and brought him fame. It is a novel of deep social problems which examines injustices in a North England mining community. Cronin shows the hard life and working conditions of the miners. David, the main character, wishing to serve his people, joins the Labour Party but soon gets disappointed. He realizes how deep the gap is between what the labourists say and the reality of life, the gap between the rich and the poor. He loses elections and returns to the mine with clear mind and heart.

World War II caused changes in Cronin's literary activities. He left for America and in his subsequent novels he dealt less and less with burning social problems. His novels of this period are: The Keys of the Kingdom (1941) - a story about a catholic missionary Father Francis Chisholm who goes to China to convert the Chinese to Christianity. He becomes familiar with the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, adopts a simple way of life, and advocates ecumenical cooperation between all Christians; The Green Years (1944) which describes the childhood of an Irish boy in a small Scottish town; Shannon's Way (1948) - a sequel of the previous novel. In The Spanish Gardener (1950) and Beyond this Place (1953) the author analyses the psychology of the characters without touching upon social questions.

His other best-known books are: Adventure in Two Worlds (1952) - an autobiographical novel in which he returned to his experiences as a doctor in Scotland and South Wales; The Crusader's Tomb (1956)); The Northern Light (1958); A Song of Sixpence (1964).

After World War II A.J.Cronin travelled with his family in Europe. He moved to Switzerland and settled down in Lucerne. He had lived in Switzerland for the last 35 years of his life. He died on January 9, 1981, in Montreaux, Switzerland.

The Citadel. When the novel The Citadel was published in 1937, it gained world fame at once. It fascinates the reader not only with its interesting plot but also with its realism. At the beginning of the novel we get acquainted with Andrew Manson. He has just graduated from the university. He arrives at Blaenelly, a small provincial town in South Wales where he is to start his medical career as an assistant to a doctor. He is excited by the prospect of his future work and even the rainy October afternoon and the dull bare landscape could not spoil his cheerful mood. But the work at Blaenelly turns out to be more difficult than Andrew had imagined. Old doctor Page is so seriously ill that he cannot help Andrew even with his advice. He sees that his knowledge gained at the university is not sufficient. Besides he has ho experience and does not know the work conditions .of a doctor in a small provincial town lacking even a primitive hospital. These conditions are clearly described by Philip Denny, a clever and talented surgeon: “There's no hospital, no ambulance, no X-rays, no anything. If you want to operate you use the kitchen table. You wash up afterwards at the scullery bosh. The sanitation won't bear looking at. In a dry summer the kids die like flies with infantile cholera.”

The local authorities do not adopt any measures to stop the epidemic. Manson's attempts to summon the District Medical Officer end in failure. Andrew understands that being a doctor he is responsible for the health of the people on his cards. He must find some means of fighting with the indifference of the government. Thus he agrees to Denny's proposal to blow up the old sewer, which is the cause of infection. After blowing it up Andrew feels exceedingly happy.

But Blaenelly is not the right place for Andrew who wants to be independent, who wants to do something really good for the people. So he and his wife Christine Barlow, a school teacher, leave Blaenelly for Aberalaw where he gets a post as assistant with the Medical Aid Society. In Aberalaw the financial side is better, so are the working conditions, though far from good. He has to face many difficulties. As Andrew is just and honest, it is against his conscience to write a certificate of incapacity for work to a man who is fit for it. Such a case presents itself which is enough to start a trouble. Many of his patients come to him and demand their cards back, they do not want him as doctor. Besides it makes Andrew indignant that the doctors must pay a fifth of their income to the chief doctor. However, worst of all was the routine of the members of the Committee of the Medical Aid Society, who did not want to do real scientific work. Time passes until the patients begin to feel confidence in the young doctor and respect him.

Inspired by Christine, Andrew makes up his mind to take the examination for the M.R.C.P. (Member of the Royal College of Physicians) degree. After achieving the new degree Andrew turns to actual problems - he writes a scientific work in order to improve the life of the miners. Assisted by Christine he makes a number of experiments on guinea pigs, but his work is interrupted by ignorant members of the Committee. He is summoned to appear before the Committee for doing his work “without the necessary permit”.

He finds out that there are things which he cannot fight alone - namely - the whole medical system of bourgeois England. He feels tired, irritable, worried. He gets utterly disappointed with his work at Aberalaw and drops it. With his last money he buys a practice in a poor district of London. His earnings at first are hardly sufficient for food. To Andrew's wife Christine it seems real work, but Andrew has got tired of all his vain attempts to be of great use to his people. He looks back and sees only defeats, sees that the medical system is rotten and conservative. And Andrew turns away from the principles he has tried hard to fight for. In London he has no true friends like Denny and Hope to support him, but such as Doctor Freddie Hampton and the like, who know how to succeed, of course, not by honest work but by means of cheating, charging large fees and prescribing stock medicine for every disease. He begins to strive only for material wealth and succeeds. “Life moved too swiftly for him to pause long for reflection. The pace exhilarated him. He had a false sensation of strength. He felt vital, increasing in consequence, master of himself and of his destiny.” Christine sees the changes in her husband and is terribly upset. She tries to explain to him that he is becoming a victim to the very system he so hated earlier. When Andrew sees that his worshipped surgeon Ivory cannot perform a simple, operation, the result of which is the death of his patient, he feels guilty, and he understands that he has gone from real life, that he has betrayed his noble cause. He decides to continue his medical practice on a high scientific standing. Christine is willing to support him. When Manson is firm in his decision to begin a new life he has to suffer another blow - Christine meets a tragic death, she is run over by a bus. Only with the help of his true friends does Andrew get over it. He regards Christine's death as punishment for his “crime”. At first Andrew thought that he could not bear his misfortune. Supported by his friends, he recovers. Together with Denny and Hope they decide to leave London for Stanberough, a small provincial town, to start good Christine's death as punishment for his “crime”. At first Andrew thought that he could not bear his misfortune. Supported by his friends, he recovers. Together with Denny and Hope they decide to leave London for Stanberough, a small provincial town, to start good work. And the reader believes that they will devote their lives to benefiting mankind.

His last hour in London Andrew spent at Christine's grave, thinking of all he had gone through.

Graham Greene

1904-1991

Graham Greene, an English novelist and short story writer, was born at Berkhamstead. He was educated at Berkhamstead School of which his father was headmaster. He studied also at Oxford, where he won a fellowship in Modern History. Then he moved to London where he worked as sub-editor of the London Times (1926-1930). He travelled a good deal in America and for some time he lived in Mexico, which became a scene of more than one of his books.

From 1935 to 1939 he was a film critic for the Spectator. When World War II broke out he went to West Africa to work for the Foreign Office. From 1954 G.Greene worked as a journalist in Indo-China.

Greene's novels deal with real-life burning problems. His observations are concentrated on the actual details of poverty and misery. The author penetrates the weak spots in the capitalist world and explores the corruption of the human spirit. Social conditions are shown only as a background for his novels, though he does not lead the reader away from reality into the world of dreams and fantasy.

Some bourgeois critics class Greene among the “modernists” because the themes employed by Greene and the “modernists” are much the same. But Greene's pessimism and skepticism differ from those of the “modernists”. While their bitterness is inspired by a hatred of humanity, Greene's pessimism rests upon a deeply rooted sympathy for mankind. Unlike the “modernists” who are mostly interested in the description of the crime itself, Greene tries to investigate the motives behind the crime. He shows that people's bad qualities are the natural result of the cruel inhumane conditions of life. He reveals the corrupting influence of capitalist civilization on man's nature.

Greene is known as the author of psychological detective novels - “entertainments”, and “serious novels” - as he called them. The main themes of both genres are much the same, only in the “serious novels” the inner world of the characters is more complicated, the psychological analysis is deeper. His serious novels contain a penetrating treatment of psychological, social and religious problems. They reflect the moral bankruptcy of capitalist society and are consequently written in dark, gloomy colours. In these novels Greene often comes out as a severe critic of bourgeois society and an influential fighter against colonial policy.

In his novel England Made Me (1935) he exposes with great satiric forces the back-stage secrets of the black market and cosmopolitan big business. Feeling keenly the unhealthy tendencies of capitalist civilization he has created shocking and moving scenes in his novel Brighton Rock (1938).

In one of his most considerable post-war novels The Heart of the Matter (1948) Greene tries to prove that happiness is an impossibility for the sensitive man, that no one can arrange another's happiness.

Greene's well-known novel The Quiet American (1955) gives evidence of great changes in the author's world outlook. He has come to the conclusion that in the complicated present-day political situation an honest person cannot stand aside from social struggle.

In 1961 Greene published one of his best, but at the same time the most contradictory novels A Burnt-Out Case. In this novel Greene has concentrated his attention on a complicated psychological problem - on the inner tragedy of a well-known Belgian architect who is not only disillusioned with his own life but also with the whole Western civilization.

The novel The Comedians (1966) is built up on two different and contradictory planes. One of them is the tragicomedy played by the middle-aged white colonial officials - a comedy characteristic of Greene-the-skeptic. The more important, new plane, however, is the serious one - the fight of the Haitian partisans against Papa Doc's regime. The scene is laid in Haiti, in the year 1965, when the relations between the US government and the local puppet regime became cooler owing to the uprising in Santo Domingo.

The other novels belonging to the serious category are: The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930), Rumour at Nightfall (1931), It's a Battlefield (1934), The Power and the Glory (1940), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), Doctor Fisher from Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980 ), J'accuse (1982).

The novels classed as entertainments are: Stamboul Train (1932), A Gun for Sale (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1942), Loser Takes All (1955), Travels with My Aunt (1970).

The Quiet American. The action of Greene's novel takes place in Viet-Nam, where the French colonizers are waging a “dirty war” against the Vietnamese people. The main hero of the novel, Fowler, an English newspaper reporter, has lived long enough to get disappointed in life; according to him he has come to Viet-Nam to die. Although Fowler is married (he has left his wife Helen in England), he is in love with a Vietnamese girl Phuong with no intention to marry her. Events bring Fowler in close touch with Pyle, a young American, who is an American Intelligence Service agent. But their acquaintance does not last long - Pyle is murdered. Pyle's murder makes Fowler turn over in his mind all his intercourse with him.

As a newspaper reporter Fowler has always remained true to his principles - not to interfere with any events, but remain a neutral observer. He does not strive for sensations - he simply writes about things he has seen. That is why from time to time he goes to the frontline on his own risk. Such “excursions” make him see the suffering of the Vietnamese people and the futility of the war going on.

Fowler and Pyle meet first at the hotel “Continental” on the day of Pyle's arrival in Saigon. Pyle does not know the real state of affairs in Viet-Nam and Fowler kindly agrees to inform the latter of the present situation in the country. The narrator of the events, Thomas Fowler, cool, self-possessed, is determined not to get personally involved in any of the political issues. Pyle, “the quiet American”, as Fowler called him, seems at first an innocent virtuous youth, who has adopted all the catchwords about liberty, democracy, self-determination and book-learnt doctrines that can give a patriotic American an excuse for trying to clean up the world in the interests of idealism and big business.

Pyle gets acquainted with Phuong. He is fascinated by the girl and begins to court her. His visits to Fowler become more frequent and once he even admits that he is, going to propose to the girl. He is sure that Phuong will be willing to marry him, because he would give her wealth and happiness, while Fowler can offer her nothing.

Meanwhile Fowler receives a letter from his editorial office - in England in which he is told to return to England. Being afraid that Phuong might agree to marry Pyle Fowler tells her that he is not going to England. Phuong refuses to marry Pyle and remains with Fowler.

Soon a terrible explosion takes place in Saigon; many people are killed and crippled. On seeing the disaster all around Fowler suspects that it is Pyle who supplies the colonial authorities with American plastics. He remembers his conversation with Mr. Heng, a Chinese merchant, who has given him some hints about Pyle's activities in Viet-Nam; Fowler understands how Pyle fights for “democracy”.

One day on returning home Fowler finds Phuong gone. Overcome by anger, pity and loneliness Fowler goes to the front, where he witnesses all the horrors of war. It makes him hate the war, and he sees that many French officers and soldiers share his opinion.

He meets Pyle and discusses different problems with him. The “innocent” American maintains the opinion that only the USA can save Viet-Nam from all disasters and calamities and has the right to interfere into the home affairs of other countries. Fowler sees that this young modest and “innocent” fellow has become more dangerous to the Vietnamese people than all the French troops, for his activities cause death to women and children. Fowler and Heng arrive at the decision to do away with Pyle. Fowler invites Pyle to dinner at a small remote restaurant. On the way to the restaurant Heng's men kill Pyle. Thus Pyle's own harmful activities have doomed him to death.

The conflict between Pyle, an agent of the American Secret Service, and Fowler, and English journalist, throws some light on the role the United States played in Viet-Nam. The book exposes the real aims of the Western civilization in that country. The political problem, however, is closely connected with the moral aspect of the question: has any nation the right to arrange the life of another nation, has it the right to decide another nation's fate?

The Quiet American is Greene's masterpiece not only for its high ideological content. It demonstrates also Greene's art of composition, his ability, logically to develop an exciting plot.

Charles Percy Snow

1905-1980

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester. By the end of the twenties he graduated from Cambridge University and went on working there in the field of molecular physics. In 1930 he became a Fellow of his college. This academic life went on until the beginning of World War II, when he became a civil servant and was engaged in selecting scientific personnel. After the war C.P. Snow worked in industry and was appointed a Civil Service Commissioner. For excellent service he received a knighthood in 1957. His studies in physics are as widely known as his articles and lectures on both the relations between literature and science and literature and society.

During the sixties he visited the Soviet Union with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, a well-known English woman novelist. She is the author of socio-psychological novels An Avenue of Stone (1947), The Survival of the Fittest (1968), The Good Listener (1975), satirical novels The Unspeakable Skipton (1959), Cork Street, Next to the Hatter's (1965).

C.P. Snow began writing fiction in the thirties. His first novels were Death Under the Sail (1932) and The Search (1934). Six years later, in 1940, his novel Strangers and Brothers appeared. This novel was the opening book in a long sequence of novels written in the forties, fifties and sixties. Later Strangers and Brothers became the general title of the cycle.

The second novel entitled The Light and the Dark, was published in 1947. It was succeeded by Time of Hope (1949), The Masters (1951), The New Men (1954), Homecomings (1956), The Conscience of the Rich (1959) and The Affair (1960). In the 1960s Corridors of Power (1964) and The Sleep of Reason were added to the previous novels. The next novel, entitled Last Things was published in 1970.

In general C.P. Snow, true to critical realism, shows the panorama of English society in the prewar, war and post-war, years. In Strangers and Brothers and Time of Hope one can see the middle class in an English provincial town, in The Light and the Dark - the aristocracy, in Corridors of Power - the upper English administration. In The Masters and The Affairs the novelist reveals a profound knowledge of university life. He is particularly receptive to the conflicts of the people belonging to different classes and social groups.

The Strangers and Brothers series of novels, record in the first person the experiences of a lawyer and government administrator named Lewis Eliot. These novels deal with his background, his struggles, his friends, his college at Cambridge, and the complicated society he lives in. The sequence of the novels is linked together through this autobiographical character. Sometimes he takes a direct part in the action, at other times he tells the story or comments on the events of the novel. Lewis Eliot, like Snow, was born in 1905. The author depicts his own experiences and his impressions of society from 1914 till the middle fifties. As a young man in Time of Hope Lewis falls deeply in love with a neurotic girl, Sheila. He courts her for years, and wins her confidence although he never wins her love. She falls in love with Hugh, a man as weak and uncertain as herself. In order to win Sheila, Lewis convinces Hugh that she is entirely mad and Hugh, always anxious to avoid complications, disappears and never sees her again. Deprived of the only man she could love, Sheila turns to Lewis in desperation and marries him. Lewis quite openly assumes the responsibility for her, yet, at the end of the novel, he begins to complain that his attention to Sheila has begun to ruin his career as a barrister.

In the novels that deal with the later life of Lewis, he frequently repeats that he has sacrificed his career for Sheila, acknowledging less and less as time goes on, his responsibility for her. Lewis Eliot is a lawyer, who belongs to the sphere of society as Snow himself. His views and standpoints are influenced by bourgeois society in which he was born. Thus Snow portrays his narrator as a love-sick young man, enterprising barrister, who is also a cool and intelligent government official and a compassionate family man with his second wife.

Strangers and Brothers end with Lewis Eliot, who is trying to contrive a dramatic acquittal for his friend George Passant, on a charge of fraud. Though acquitted, George is never entirely redeemed by society. But he has had his moment of drama and remains a naive but noble man.

All these novels are full of trial scenes, startling revelations, and dramatic rehearsals which even Lewis Eliot's calm cannot tone down completely.

Snow's novels are most effective when they relay on a kind of nostalgic social history, generally, the best novels are those dealing with the early days in Lewis Eliot's career. These scenes are described with ease, fondness and are rich in details.

Corridors of Power is a novel of the English top officials and statesmen of the fifties. The chief figure is a tough and ruthless English politician Roger Quaife, who wants to do something valuable with the power he has won. His effort to take Great Britain out of the nuclear arms race provides the centre of the story - a story of what men of action do, in success and in failure.

The main hero of The Affairs, Donald Howard, a young scientist whose reputation for being a “Red” is known to the reactionary administration of Cambridge University, is to be expelled on the pretext of having falsified a scientific document.

Many people of different political views are involved in the conflict, and the novelist exposes their real motives covered by the mask of academic traditions.

Snow's novels in the cycle The Strangers and Brothers are first and foremost “problem novels”. He had been particularly interested in such ethic problems as “humanism”, “conscience”, “justice”, “truth”, “power”, and “sense of responsibility”.

Sometimes these novels have been erroneously called “political” mainly because the author's attitude towards the British Establishment is critical though in these novels Snow solves different ethical problems from the point of view of an individual - the part played by an individual in society and the influence of society on the individual, why people are strangers to one another and not brothers, what interests unite them.

General problems of contemporary politics, of various ideological trends or theoretical currents are rarely treated in his work. In spite of the autobiographical nature of the whole cycle he carefully avoids giving his personal opinion, but tries to present some special conflict as impartially and objectively as possible. The main theme of his books is struggle for power: who will be elected? (The Masters) Who will retire? (The Affair) Which party will win? (Corridors of Power), etc. This general theme of struggle for power is not presented as refined game, which involves many people, governed by different interests, emotions, traditions and laws.

William Golding

1911-1993

The prominent place in modern English literature is taken by William Golding due to his philosophical and allegorical novels. He was educated at Grammar School and at Oxford. He was in the Navy during World War II. Golding is the author of a number of essays, radio plays, short stories, a good deal of poetry, but his name first became known to the general public when his novel Lord of the Flies was published in 1954. It appeared as a response to Robert Michael Ballantyne's novel Coral Island (1858). That novel irritated Golding by its vitality and romanticism when he read the book already after the war. The group of children who happened on an uninhabited island behaved themselves like real gentlemen. They were kind and humane, the fire they made united them. Golding's war experience installed him in the idea that evil and cruelty are inherent in man and can not be explained only by the pressure of social mechanisms. He said that the basis of evil is to be found inside the country and its people. The cruelty of fascism and the war horrors made the writer think over the fate of mankind and nature of man.

Lord of the Flies. His novel Lord of the Flies is written as a warning about the subsequences of fascism. This novel has been called a modern classic and has had great popularity. The story tells of how nice people can, under certain circumstances, become savages very quickly. It is a story about a group of boys who found themselves on a desert island when their plane was shot down, and all the grown-ups perished. The island is not a real island; it symbolizes everyone who tries to act with common sense: to keep order, to built huts on the beach, to keep a fire on the mountain top as a signal. They make the fire like Ballantyne's boys did, but the fire disunites them. Stealing fire is denying the very idea of democratic equality and the conception of self estimation of individuals. Intelligent and clever boys from respectable families turn into a tribe of savages with the ugly features of tribal consciousness. The image of the beast is materialization of fear which the boys experience because they feel defenseless not only before power of nature but before each other. The original group splits into two - united around Ralph and around Jack. Simon and Piggy are the only boys whom Ralph really trusts. Jack's group is called “savages”. They paint their faces, hunt pigs, kill them and then in the evening dance around “The Dance of Death”. They turn into savages forgetting all norms of civilized society they were born into. Jack is only interested in hunting and power. It was sort of a game at first. They hunted pigs, and enjoyed it. “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood!” But very soon hunting down the beast turns into hunting down a human being. “I cut the pig's throat,” said Jack, proudly, and yet twitched as he said it. “Can I borrow yours, Ralph, to make a nick in the hilt?” The pig's head, covered by myriads of flies, is materialization of emanation of evil. It is stated by Ralph when he says, “I fear ourselves.” The boys regress to savagery. Like real savages they tear Simon during their dance and then brutally and deliberately smash Piggy with a huge stone. In reversing the pattern of children's adventure stories and locating evil in the boys themselves, Golding reenergized the notion of original sin. Civilization regresses rapidly. Though Golding shows that not all boys turn into savages. Ralph, Piggy, Simon, Eric and Sam still leave the hope of possibility to fight and conquer evil.

“Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up like dead wood - Simon was dead and Jack had... . The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and never wiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” This is a serious warning to the world of grown-ups whose inner cruelty and savageness showed up openly and disastrously in the war.

Other novels by William Golding are The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967), Envoy Extraordinary (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Passage (1980), A Moving Target (1984) and others.

Facile fashionable doctrines of progress and evolution are upended in The Inheritors where we see a crucial stage in the rise of our species through the eyes of Neanderthal man (and hear a good deal of his utterance too). Neanderthal man is innocent, pious and amiable, while our own progenitor, Homo sapiens, who comes to displace him in the process of evolutionary development, is double-minded and capable of self-deception. The theme of the human fall is present again. In Pincher Martin a shipwrecked sailor imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at the end we learn that he died in the wreck and that the whole recollection has taken place at the point of drowning. Free Fall is the study of Sammy Mountjoy, a successful artist, how he loses his soul and is brought up against the consequences when the girl he has seduced goes insane. In The Spire Golding studies the moral and spiritual condition of Jocelin, dean of a cathedral, whose obsessive resolve to build a great cathedral spire regardless of the consequences has a dual motivation in faith and in sheer self-assertion, through which the powers of heaven and hell collide. Golding continued to produce novels in which he experiments boldly with substance and style.

William Golding is also the author of the play The Brass Butterfly (1958), a collection of verse Poems (1934), and the books of essays The Hot Gates (1965) and A Moving Target (1982).

Iris Murdoch

1919-1999

Iris Murdoch has written novels, drama, philosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet but she is best known and most successful as a philosopher and a novelist. Although she claims not to be a philosophical novelist and does not want philosophy to intrude too openly into her novels, she is a Platonist and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and characterization are clearly interrelated in her novels.

Murdoch began to write prose in 1953. She soon became very popular with the English readers. Her novels Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, the Sandcastle, The Unicorn, The Red and the Green, The Time of the Angels, An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, and many others are characterized by the deep interest in philosophical problems and in the inner world of the man. Iris Murdoch shows the loneliness and sufferings of the human being in the hostile world.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She attended school in Bristol and studied philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, the two oldest universities in England. Then for many years Murdoch was teaching philosophy at Oxford. French writers and philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett influenced her early writing. By the time she began to write Murdoch was a convinced adherent of the existentialist trend in philosophy and these problems rule the focus of her attention in many of her novels. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), has extensive existential derivations. She published two books on philosophy: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Conceptions.

She always strived to be a realist in her novels and mentioned that not once in her interviews and critical essays on literature and style. Although honest, intelligent, and well written, the novels of Iris Murdoch nevertheless lack clear definition. Her manner was that of intricate weavings, blending both reality and dreams, and all that enveloped in a complicated psychological “pudding”. Under the Net fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim (1954) and John Wain in Hurry on Down (1953). Her Jake Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis's Jim Dixon and Wain's Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for loss of integrity and dignity. Jake is an angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly-swims in the Thames at night, steals a performing dog, sneaks in and out of locked apartments, steals food. His is a puerile existence in which he remains “pure” even while carrying on his adolescent activities.

Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, and The Bell established Iris Murdoch's point of view and method, and set up the major themes of her career: her wish to preserve in fiction the sense of the contingent, the unpredictability of human nature, the contraries of ordinary character, the intractability of the world where we live.

Murdoch's novels written in the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century such as A Severed Head (1961), The Time of the Angels (1966), A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976) are full of senseless crimes, horrors and intricate love affairs. The extreme situations in which she places her characters spring from the synthesis of two contradictory propositions that underlie her works. These propositions run as follows: “Everything must happen in accordance with the laws of logic therefore nothing that happens is intrinsically surprising” and “Everything that happens is contingent, therefore it is free and involves a total response of the human personality, therefore it is always surprising.” So the world of Iris Murdoch is a mixture of most of the elements of our everyday life and experience, and symbolic elements loaded with implications and puzzles. In her latest novels the writer's inlaid vision has become suppressed and obscured in a way by somewhat pessimistic approach to the individual and society.

Her characters are memorable primarily because they do have a realistic psychological and philosophical basis. Unlike those of many modern writers, Murdoch's characters exist independently, not as a reflection of their author, and she presents them, even demonic figures like Julius King in A Fairy Honourable Defeat, lovingly and without judgment. In keeping with her moral philosophy, few of Murdoch's characters possess correct vision, but many experience momentary enlightenment.

The Unicorn, one of Murdoch's best novels, gives a picture of different human passions and relationships. Marian Taylor, a young educated woman was asked as a private teacher to a family living in very lonely place. Very soon Marian begins to notice very strange, mysterious and unusual things about the place and the people.

Love is the dominant theme of Murdoch's later novels. They emphasize and aspire towards the truth-conveying capacity of art, for Murdoch believes that great art reveals truths for generations to come, and she insists on the artist's duty to tell truth as he sees it. Critics complain about unevenness, the need for editing, and intellectualism, but there is no denying the rich and varied texture of the Murdoch world, peopled with real and various characters.

The Bell. For Iris Murdoch, there are basically two kinds of people. There are those for whom life is desperate; they are deeply committed to whatever they are engaged in, and they can see nothing else. In their steadfastness, they may become grim and morbid. Then there are those for whom life has not settled into any fixed pattern; they are flexible and mobile, desirous of variety and willing to make changes. In the first group, we have Michael Meade, the leader of a lay religious community located near an Anglican Order of nuns. In the second group, there is Dora, an easily distracted young woman, who comes to the community with her youthful friend, Toby Gashe.

The conflict concerns the relations of the spirited, sensual, and unintelligent Dora with her husband and later with the community, whose spirit is so completely different from her own. The clash between the two is inevitable, and Iris Murdoch chooses to define the conflict in terms of burlesque - a practical joke demonstrates Dora's need for self-expression at the expense of the community. The joke centers around a bell, a bell that comes with a legend from the past. In the legend, the bell of the then Benedictine order of nuns fell into the lake, the result of the Bishop's curse. The curse itself derived from the infidelity of a nun and her refusal to confess. When the bell flew into the lake, the guilty nun, overwhelmed by the demonstration of God's power of punishment, flew from the Abbey and drowned herself in the lake.