The Light and the Dark is the fourth novel in C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series. Set in England in the lead-up to and during World War II, it portrays Lewis Eliot's friendship with the gifted scholar and remarkable individual Roy Calvert, and Calvert's inner turmoil and quest for meaning in life. Calvert was based on Snow's friend, Coptic scholar, Charles Allberry. Their relationship is developed further in The Masters.
The title - The Light and the Dark - refers to the beliefs of Manichaeism, which the book refers to as "Christian heresy" but is now often referred to as religion in its own right. "In its cosmology, the whole of cosmology is a battle of the light against the dark. Man's spirit is part of the light, and his flesh of the dark."
The title has resonance to the build up to war, the sense of catastrophe so widespread in the 1930s, and the mental health problems of Calvert.
Famous quotes containing the word light:
“The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there
Its two webs.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)