By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The English novelist, poet, essayist, and Christian apologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) is revered by many readers – and fellow writers – for his wit, his insight into human nature, and his brilliant storytelling. His Father Brown stories are often compared with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, while he remains one of the most quotable English writers of the last century or so.
Chesterton was greatly admired by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, and like Borges (who famously never wrote a novel), Chesterton was at his best with the short format: essays, short stories, and poems. However, any list of Chesterton’s best books should include at least a couple of his novels, as well as collections of shorter works.
Below, I have picked out some of his most important and representative works, but I’d be keen to hear from other Chesterton enthusiasts. What’s his best book?
1. The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
What’s the greatest work of speculative fiction written in the first half of the twentieth century but set in the year 1984? Orwell’s classic novel will usually take the laurel, but Chesterton’s 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is set eighty years in the future, surely deserves the honour of second place.
Chesterton’s book is – characteristically – much more humorous and light-hearted than Orwell’s later dystopian novel, and sees an insignificant London clerk crowned as King of England. He turns London into a vast carnival for his own amusem*nt – thereby prefiguring the real Notting Hill Carnival! – and a young man named Adam Wayne raises an army to defend his fiefdom.
Although Chesterton doesn’t make any striking technological predictions about his future London – that isn’t the point of the book, which is essentially a kind of satirical fantasy – he does posit a future world governed by deadening bureaucracy, so we can safely allow him a success on that front.
2. Heretics.
Chesterton was, along with Orwell, one of the finest English essayists of the first half of the twentieth century. This collection of essays, published in 1905, is a good place to begin exploring Chesterton’s flair for the essay form.
Here we find meditations on fellow writers such as Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells, as well as essays on such subjects as Christmas, novelists writing about poverty in the slums, and writers on the institution of the family. The unifying theme is people who believe they are superior to Christian values, although Chesterton points out the flimsy basis on which their superiority often rests.
Chesterton excelled in the short-story form, and this little collection, published in 1905, is a wonderful showcase for his talents. The five tales feature the eponymous club in which members have invented some wholly new and innovative way to earn a living: hence ‘queer trades’.
Even reading a description of these curious metiers is enough to want one to read about them: a man who runs an agency dealing with Adventure and Romance, an author who has devised a new language in order to test his theory of language acquisition, and an ‘Organiser of Repartee’ or banter.
Subtitled A Nightmare, this 1908 book is surely Chesterton’s best-known novel. The centrepiece is the meeting of the Council of the New Anarchists, each of whose seven members is named after a day of the week (hence the novel’s title).
Gabriel Syme, a detective at odds with the anarchist values of Lucian Gregory (who runs an unruly community of artists), goes undercover as ‘Thursday’ to infiltrate the group. The novel has a delicious (and rightly famous) comic twist which unfolds gradually as the novel’s farce develops.
5. Orthodoxy.
‘The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.’ So Chesterton begins this non-fiction work, which was conceived in response to hostile criticism Chesterton received for Heretics, his earlier essay collection. It’s one of Chesterton’s finest works of Christian apologetics.
Another work of Christian non-fiction from Chesterton, The Everlasting Man is concerned above all with one question: what makes us human, or, to put it another way, what does it mean to be ‘human’?
Here we get another intellectual battle with H. G. Wells (an atheist and proponent of evolutionary biology), whose coldly rational view of humanity is countered by Chesterton’s theology.
7. The Ballad of the White Horse.
This 1911 poem is an epic ballad about the Saxon King Alfred the Great, and is sometimes viewed as one of the last great traditional epic poems in the English language. Chesterton describes how the ninth-century King Alfred was able to defeat the Vikings in order to defend his homeland of Wessex from invaders.
8. Charles Dickens.
Has there ever been a better pairing of critic and their subject? Chesterton was ideally, perhaps even uniquely, placed to write this critical study of Charles Dickens, given his own flair for the comic while also exploring social issues in his fiction.
The book, first published in 1911, is packed full of rare and valuable insights into Dickens’s work, but it is also a wonderfully amusing and witty read, too.
9. The Innocence of Father Brown.
Chesterton created his mild-mannered, round-faced priest-turned-detective Father Brown in response to the cold scientific rationalism of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Where Holmes solves a case through his well-known ‘deductions’ and forensic attention to physical detail, Father Brown is more intuitive, using his time spent listening to penitents’ confessions in the Roman Catholic confessional box to help him get to the bottom of the mystery.
This does mean that some of the Father Brown stories are less than satisfying as puzzles for the reader to grapple with and attempt to solve, but it’s still great fun to see Chesterton the plotter at work, as an apparent paradox is unravelled and resolved with ingenuity and a flair for storytelling.
10. The Wisdom of Father Brown.
I decided to include two of the Father Brown collections on this list, because Chesterton wrote a good number of Father Brown stories, and they are among his most enjoyable and accessible work. This second collection builds on the first, and there’s a definite sense of Chesterton building up the title character since the first volume (this one came out in 1914, three years after the first).
So, in ‘The Absence of Mr Glass’, Chesterton establishes Father Brown’s peculiar ‘wisdom’ in contrast to the methods employed by a scientific criminologist, Dr Orion Hood (Chesterton had a real gift for names). There are also cases involving Italian criminals (who may not be all they first seem) and foreign intrigue aplenty.
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