In one sense the book fails. Snow is incapable of comprehending the horror of the crime, or at least of conveying that horror to us. Eliot’s attempt to understand the young women leave him with ‘a sense of mystification that led into nothing.’ He is, like his author, too much a man of the rational, ordered world. One thinks of what Dostoevsky or Simenon might have made of these two.

Yet there is something impressive in Eliot’s lumbering, laborious efforts to comprehend something out of his experience, beyond his imagining. He is a conventional figure, whose success has enabled him to believe that the world is well-ordered. Somebody once ascribed to him the opinion of ‘an elder statesman of science’ that ‘sensible men usually reached sensible conclusions’. He knows enough to think this ‘an astonishing remark’, not enough to understand a world from which that sort of sense has been banished.

All the same, there’s more to old Snow than Simon allowed: a dogged honesty and an ability to show us the world as it presents itself to practical men engaged in public affairs, to show it in its strengths and limitations. Not enough to make a great novelist, but enough to make him a satisfyingly good one. 

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