ARCHIVED REVIEW: The Napoleon of Notting Hill (11/11/10)

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

by G.K. Chesterton

It is 1980 (the future) but everything is pretty much the same as at the turn of the century. Everything has become more gray, more normal, and the king is chosen through alphabetical order, since it is just as good as through birth.

In this humorless world lives Auberon Quin, a satirist, who thinks everything is funny. When he is chosen to be king, he decides to turn the world on its head. He draws up a proclamation, separating London into her different burroughs, making them walled cities, and commanding the Provosts of those cities to wear garish medieval garb, speak in high romantic language, and be followed around everywhere by trumpeters and halbriders.

Then, he meets the one Provost who takes it seriously. Adam Wayne sees romance in everything, everything is significant and glorious. Adam believes this so passionately that he starts a war over a road that will go through his neighborhood.

I loved this book so much! The entire book is an extended parable, examining those who don't take life seriously, and those who take even a lamppost deadly seriously. I was intrigued because I never knew which side G.K. Chesterton was on. He let each side speak their piece.

My favorite moment in the book involves Adam Wayne recruiting for his army and he goes into a succession of shops. The first is a grocer, and instead of seeing a plain grocer, he sees a purveyor of exotic goods from all over the world, and recommends he organize his shop by country, decking each display with silks and incense and artifacts from the country. He sees the chemist (pharmacist) as a dark, benevolent sorcerer, with a shop full of strange vials and colorful liquids.

He sees the ordinary as extraordinary, and by the end of the book, he has changed the world.

If you liked this book, you may also like:

Essential Essays of G.K. Chesterton

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

ARCHIVED REVIEW: The Man Who Was Thursday (10/29/10)

The Man Who Was Thursday

by G.K. Chesterton

After a heated, but supposedly theoretical, debate about anarchism at an evening garden party, poet Gregory Syme finds himself leaping headlong into an dangerous mission to infiltrate the powerful anarchist cell in the city. But nothing is as it seems.

I loved this book! Every time I thought I knew what was going on, GK threw a curve ball at me. And even when I discovered what was going on before it happened, it was still a delight to watch it unfold. It gets a bit allegorical, but it is so beautiful and satisfying that I didn't really care.

And GK's writing is incredibly Neil Gaimany, especially in his character descriptions of the anarchist council. Its like a Sandman pantheon. I can see how Neil was influenced by GK.

If you liked this book, you may also like:

Essential Writings of G.K. Chesterton

ARCHIVED REIVIEW: Essential Writings of G.K. Chesterton (10/21/10)

Essential Writings of G.K. Chesterton

Edited by William Griffin

(the cover of the book is boring, so here is a fun caricature of GK).

This book is a collection of G.K. Chesterton's non-fictional writing on philosophy, social commentary and religion.

With this book, I have fallen in love with GK Chesterton: the man, if not the writer. He was an enormous man, with a fat walrus mustache. He dressed so shabbily that his wife dressed him in an opera cape, strange hat and a sword cane so that people wouldn't notice his shabby clothes because of the eccentricity of his dress. He ate a lot, drank a lot, and was merry a lot. He was jovial and generous, very spiritual, and yet not afraid to live in this world to the fullest. He valued Humor and Humility above all things, loved a good joke, and reveled in paradox.

All of this is revealed throughout his writing. In one essay, he expounds upon the luckiness of a man who thinks he has discovered a new land, but realizes upon arrival that he has sailed back to England. He gets both things that man needs most: the uncertainty and excitement of adventure and wonder, and the cozy stability of home. In another, he talks about how you should love the world for all its gladness, and if it is sad, you should then love it more. In another, he expounds upon how a child sees a tree and a lamp post with equal wonder, and how we should retain that wonder at every day life as we grow up. He talks about how the spiritual man is the only sane man, because he can see the smaller and the larger picture by the light of his belief, that virtue is not the absence of vice, but a "vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell." He wrote a series of essays entitled, "Why I am Not a Pagan," "Why I am a Christian," "Why I am a Catholic," "Why I am an Elf," and "Why I am a Clown." He talks about the silence of the universe being not emptiness, but mercy, because if we could hear the laughter of the heavens and experience the "frantic energy of divine things" we would be knocked down "like a drunken farce."

You see why I love him.

His writing does get convoluted at times, and his logic often does not follow. He runs very much on emotion and humor to get his point across, and you can very easily poke holes in some of his arguments. (There is a debate between GK and GBS at the end of the book, and this is extremely apparent when juxtaposing their styles of argument). However, I don't think he cares. He feels something, and wants to tell you why he feels that way. More often than not it is just because it is beautiful or awe inspiring, not because it is logical.

If you liked this book, you may also like:
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday