G.K. Chesterton - any good?

[kev67]

I have recently started reading some Father Brown stories. I am sorry to say, so far, I am not too bowled over. Father Brown seems to be one in the history of eccentric detectives, this time a Roman Catholic priest. The crimes are flashy but improbable. A puzzle is outlined and we all wait around until Father Brown clears it up for us. No attempt is made to get under his skin of the characters. The Wire, it is not. It is a bit like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, but not as good. I will continue reading them, but I was a bit disappointed. I wondered whether Father Brown was typical of Chesterton's writing. I noticed one of G.K. Chesterton's books being promoted in a branch of Waterstones recently. I think it was The Man Who Was Thursday. A member of staff had written a note saying it was great. Today I was listening to book programme on the radio, in which one of the guests explained why another of G.K. Chesterton's books, The Napoleon of Notting Hill had been so influential on him. If Chesterton is still in print a hundred years after he was active then presumably he was pretty good, but I don't know.

[JCamilo]

Chesterton is a better writer than both Doyle and Christie. Father Brown are actually ironic, they are improbable because Chesterton wanted to show how we easily believe in anything. And skin of character? I dunno what it means.

The man who was thursday is a great reading, not much similar to Father brown.

[free]

I have tried to read one of his 'Father Brown' stories, but I don't find it interesting. Maybe because I don't like crime stories so much. But I like his poetry... so humorous...

'Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees,'

[kev67]

Chesterton is a better writer than both Doyle and Christie. Father Brown are actually ironic, they are improbable because Chesterton wanted to show how we easily believe in anything. And skin of character? I dunno what it means.

The man who was thursday is a great reading, not much similar to Father brown.

If you think he's good, that's good. I have read he wrote in different styles, so maybe I would like his other work better. I suspect he is better at plots than people. I suppose it is difficult to write a lot of characterization in short, thirty page stories like Father Brown.

[JCamilo]

"characterization" , i am not sure what you mean. but anyways, chesterton is a storyteller, that enjoys allegories and stock characters.

[Red-Headed]

I like Chesterton, some of his poetry was very witty, & his short stories & novellas were entertaining. His work often seems to be nostalgic for a time that didn't actually exist in reality. He seemed to excel in describing the odd & the diverse in humanity itself. It seems to me that he wrote with a particular vigour yet without becoming overly tendentious in his views.

[Ecurb]

Chesterton was a great essayist, Christian apologist, and literary critic. His biographies of Francis of Assissi and Thomas Acquinas are excellent. His books on Dickens and Shaw are excellent. "Orthodoxy" is fabulous. I like some of his poetry. My personal favorite among his novels is "Napoleon of Notting Hill". I own a book of his weekly newspaper columns in which, among other things, he opposes female suffrage. To read someone as generous and goodhearted as Chesterton argue against granting women the vote is about as much fun as the reader of a newspaper column can have. Where are his equals today?

[Ecurb]

Here are some well-known quaotations of Chesterton, many of which show his love of paradoxical truths:

On money:


Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident..... To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

On education:


Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

ON Charles Dickens:


There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

ON science:


All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.

ON poetry:

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

[kev67]

Here are some well-known quaotations of Chesterton, many of which show his love of paradoxical truths:

On money:



On education:



ON Charles Dickens:



ON science:



ON poetry:

I find these pronouncements slightly irritating.

[kev67]

I think I'm beginning to get these Father Brown stories. They are about as far away from true crime as it is possible to get. They are not bad as bedtime reading, but they are not great literature. They reminded me of a radio programme I heard about Dr Who books. The authors were told never to write what the Doctor was thinking. Father Brown may as well be a timelord. I suspect G.K.Chesterton would have made a great writer of plots for TV shows like Dr Who or detective shows like Columbo. Columbo is a fairly similar character to Father Brown. His private life is never investigated. The crime he is given to solve every week is usually very serious but is always an intellectual puzzle rather than a tragedy.

Did G.K. Chesterton ever get properly serious about anything?

[JCamilo]

No, he was too inteligent to be serious about that.

[qimissung]

I especially love his quote about cheese. I must remedy the situation.

[Calidore]

I like the last three quotes especially.


I especially love his quote about cheese. I must remedy the situation.

Easy enough.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?75378-Poems-about-cheese&p=1223147#post1223147

[kev67]

I have finished selected stories of Father Brown. I am still not sure what to make of them. What they reminded me most was of the TV series, The Prisoner. In that series, each episode had something genuinely clever. I think. if G.K. Chesterton had been around in the television age, he might have written a really great TV series. The short stories themselves don't even try to be realistic. Compared to David Simon's Homocide they are crapm but they are decent reading. I am not sure why Sherlock Holmes is that much better. I think it was because a) Conan Doyle was first, b) the Holmes-Watson relationship worked better, c) there was less religious philosophising. I gather from the afterword, that The Man Who Was Thursday was Chesterton's best novel, but that it was odd.

[Carmilla]

I've read The Complete Father Brown Stories and I enjoyed just a few of them. I also read The Man Who Was Thursday, I liked it better than his detective stories. Ah, and I almost forgot, I read his Tremendous Trifles, and found some of the articles interesting, but not all of them.

[108 fountains]

I read The Complete Father Brown Stories and enjoyed them probably more than the few Sherlock Holmes stories that I've read.
I found Father Brown to be a pleasant character and thought his eccenticities to be quaint.
I don't think Chesterton wrote the stories with the intention of them being great works of literature, but simply for entertainment.
There is another author of mystery novels (as well as other topics/genres), J.K. Fletcher, who was of the same time period as Chesterton and Sir Artur Conan Doyle.
I just got his most popular novel, The Middle Temple Murder, and plan to start reading it tonight.

For myself, I really admire the "whodunnit" writers. I've tried and tried to think up a whodunnit plot for a short story and just cannot come up with one.
It must take a certain talent or skill to come up with those.

[stlukesguild]

I don't think Chesterton wrote the stories with the intention of them being great works of literature, but simply for entertainment.

Of course we have to question just how important an artist's intentions are. Did Hitchcock intend his films or Orson Welles intend Citizen Kane as "great" art? Were Mozart's opera or Moliere's... or even Shakespeare's plays... or Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy intended as anything more than entertainment?

[Emil Miller]

For myself, I really admire the "whodunnit" writers. I've tried and tried to think up a whodunnit plot for a short story and just cannot come up with one.
It must take a certain talent or skill to come up with those.

I think the crime thriller genre is more suited to the novel rather than the short story and this is borne out by the huge number of novels involving criminality, although many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, fall into that category.
Given the multiplicity of these novels it would seem that it doesn't require a great talent to write one and, having written one myself, I found that the intermingling of themes, that are a basic requirement in this type of writing, needs more breadth than the short story allows for.

[kev67]

Since reading the Father Brown stories, I gave Chesterton another chance by reading The Man Who Was Thursday. The author, Will Self, spoke up for it on the radio. He said that it was Kingsley Amis's favourite book. I found it a bonkers book, a cross between Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. Thinking about it, it has elements of James Bond stories, what with the underground complexes, secret organisations, chase sequences and fights. There is no womanizing or killing though. In fact, women don't figure very much in his stories, I have found. The book starts off rather oddly and becomes progressively more weird, and then religious, and it uses a plot device you would be told off for using at school.

I came across a poem of his called The Rolling English Road. I did like that. It was a sort of drinking poem.

[YesNo]

I've never read anything by Chesterton, but I'll see what the library has when I walk past today. Ecurb's quote of something Chesterton wrote has "bewitched" me:


All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.

[Carmilla]

I forgot that I read one of Chesterton's biographies too. I read Chaucer, and I liked it better than the books I mentioned above.