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Thread: G.K. Chesterton - any good?

  1. #16
    Registered User 108 fountains's Avatar
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    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.
    A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.
    Thomas Hardy

  2. #17
    Artist and Bibliophile stlukesguild's Avatar
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    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?
    Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
    The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
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  3. #18
    Registered User Emil Miller's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by 108 fountains View Post
    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.
    "L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.

    "Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.

  4. #19
    Registered User kev67's Avatar
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    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.
    According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
    Charles Dickens, by George Orwell

  5. #20
    Maybe YesNo's Avatar
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    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.

  6. #21
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    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.

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