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alexsarllGK Chesterton's first novel was written exactly a century ago. Since the action begins in 1984, and then flashes forward a generation, most of it must be set pretty much now. Its key conceit is that across that eighty years, nothing much changes. That's not what happened, obviously. But it's as true as it is untrue. For every advance that Chesterton misses (we travel by car now, not horse-drawn coach) there's a futurist trap into which he doesn't fall (we still travel around London on roads, not in perspex tubes). The London he describes is still recognisably the London we inhabit; at times, echoes of the real twentieth century seem to flash across the novel's surface, as when it refers to "a Notting Hill riot", for instance. Or in its description of a state of political entropy so advanced that bureaucracy runs all and the leader is chosen by lottery...though perhaps that last applies to Washington more than London.
It is a book about the danger of taking everything too seriously, and the danger of taking nothing seriously; I think I know which of these Chesterton finds the greater threat, and I'm not sure I agree, but his portrayal of them both is ripe with wry power. It's a book about London, and the magic that lurks even in its unlikeliest areas.
"Shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train."
"He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city."
And a hundred more such lines. If it is not quite, as I supposed it to be from the opening chapters, one of my ten favourite books ever, it is not very far off. Few books wiser or more wondrous are known to me.
It is a book about the danger of taking everything too seriously, and the danger of taking nothing seriously; I think I know which of these Chesterton finds the greater threat, and I'm not sure I agree, but his portrayal of them both is ripe with wry power. It's a book about London, and the magic that lurks even in its unlikeliest areas.
"Shallow romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir-trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the eagle. But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train."
"He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city."
And a hundred more such lines. If it is not quite, as I supposed it to be from the opening chapters, one of my ten favourite books ever, it is not very far off. Few books wiser or more wondrous are known to me.
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Date: 2004-05-21 08:12 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-05-21 08:44 am (UTC)And I really hate Cast....
Date: 2004-05-21 09:47 am (UTC)Boring boring boring, these records all sound the same
Date: 2004-05-21 09:49 am (UTC)Apart from helen love they're a load of shyte...
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