March 2025
I only discovered G. K. Chesterton a few years ago, through his essays which are generally excellent, and some which I would call brilliant. More recently I’ve dipped into his fiction. The Man Who was Thursday was superb, both surreal and funny, and laden with the striking descriptions — of landscapes, settings, people — of which Chesterton is a master. After that, just last month, I tried a second piece of fiction, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I wrote a brief review of that, and, as I said, I did not care for that at all — it was clearly produced by the same author, but there the surreal became simply absurd, and the humor farce. Suspension of disbelief failed.
Still, having liked so much of his writing, and having found so little recent fiction satisfying, I wanted to try again, and so turned to his Father Brown stories about a Priest-Detective. The friend who had initially brought GKC to my attention recommended the story, The Blue Cross, as his favorite, and sent me a link to this volume on Project Guttenberg. The Blue Cross was indeed excellent, and so I proceeded through the rest of the volume.
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