Backing into Father Brown

Most people, I believe, come to the writing of G.K. Chesterton through his Father Brown mysteries. I have done G.K.C. all backwards, only lately having read much of the exploits of his sagacious little priest/detective.

I remain a greater fan of Chesterton's non-fiction and poetry, but in the Father Brown stories have enjoyed Chesterton more just for his brilliant prose.

Chesterton sets the stage for The Sign of the Broken Sword;

The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of the heartless Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.

The story is worth reading for the first paragraph alone.

Another example reminds us that Chesterton is thought to have suffered bouts of depression now and then. From the opening scene of The Perishing of the Pendragons;

He heard the most trivial things and the most important with the same tasteless absorption... All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man hears a tune in the railway wheels or saw them as a sick man sees the pattern of his wall-paper.

I think we've all been there at some point.

Reading these tales intended for a broad, secular audience helps me to appreciate a little more how many who would reject his philosophy might still cherish him simply as a writer.

Comments

[John Kasaian]

Oooh this touched a nerve. My 5th grader is having a difficult time finding books he likes to read for school (a Catholic school) so I get on the school's link to AR (Advanced Reading) where students can take a test to show how much they retained after reading a book, and they get credit based on the difficulty of the book.
Fair enough. Of course the book has to be on the AR list.
Chesterton is not.
Ronald Knox is not.
R.H. Benson is not.
A big chunk of Catholic culture--a literary tradition young Catholic readers need to know---isn't on the AR list!
I will have to have a talk about this with the school ASAP.

[John Kasaian]

Mission accomplished!

[John Kasaian]

BTW on of the books I suggested was The Innocence & Wisdom of Father Brown