How does he justify that comment?
The book bored me senseless. It was utterly predictable and tedious. It's only 185 pages long and yet I found myself skimming. There are several pretty prose passages and a couple nice bits of description, but gawd, what a slog. It felt like a endless movie car chase, complete with exploding fruit carts.
Where's the genius?
Please enlighten me.
― Mouse, Saturday, 3 April 2004 06:35 (twenty-one years ago)
― prima fassy (mwah), Saturday, 3 April 2004 22:51 (twenty-one years ago)
― Cathryn (Cathryn), Monday, 5 April 2004 12:20 (twenty-one years ago)
― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 17:50 (twenty-one years ago)
I do think that he copies the shifting-through-several-moods atmosphere of a dream fairly well, as well as anything I've read. I'm assuming this is one reason for Gaiman's well-known appreciation for him.
It's a fable crossed with a dream-vision--emphatically NOT a novel. I think lack of understanding of this point is one of peoples' problems with it.
― Phil Christman, Tuesday, 6 April 2004 18:21 (twenty-one years ago)
Not sure what you mean. Obviously the novel utterly loses steam once the villain is revealed and the dream-strcuture is a cop-out. But up until then I thought it was really inventive and wise, Holmes-meets-Wells-meets-Fleming in a proto-Alan Moore kind of way. I tend to think of Chesterton like Raymond Chandler --- a classic short story writer, and one of the best sentence constructors in the English language, but a pretty wretched novelist, structure-wise.
― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Tuesday, 6 April 2004 19:35 (twenty-one years ago)
― writingstatic (writingstatic), Wednesday, 7 April 2004 05:35 (twenty-one years ago)
― DV (dirtyvicar), Wednesday, 7 April 2004 18:48 (twenty-one years ago)
*
I've never read Chesterton, but I've always loved this metaphor of Wodehouse's:
"The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin."
― Baravelli. (Jake Proudlock), Wednesday, 7 April 2004 20:28 (twenty-one years ago)
― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Thursday, 8 April 2004 09:37 (twenty-one years ago)
Perhaps it is at some level, especially if you know Chesterton well enough to expect exactly the most unexpected turn. I certainly don't think the ending is predictable, as it approaches the supreme paradox of the existence of evil in a good creation, of the possibility of happiness amid wretchedness. As in many other things, Chesterton was, in his resolution of this conundrum, both a Romantic antiquarian and a practical futurist.
That his answer -- the Incarnation -- is rendered only fleetingly gives many readers a sense of incompletion. I think G.K. left it so because, I might say to the poster who accused him of being didactic, he didn't want to lecture. A 1908 audience, moreover, needed perhaps less explanation than we.
― Paul Bonner, Thursday, 8 April 2004 19:27 (twenty-one years ago)
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 8 April 2004 23:02 (twenty-one years ago)
i think by the second or third guy turning out to be another secret agent you're meant to have twigged the pattern, you know..?
and fat + jocund god strikes me as a nice god to have, despite the "a nightmare" bit, and chesterton's grouchy afterword glossing it. i dunno.
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 8 April 2004 23:07 (twenty-one years ago)
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 8 April 2004 23:10 (twenty-one years ago)
― Paul Bonner, Friday, 9 April 2004 18:04 (twenty-one years ago)
i really want to reread this now.
― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 10 April 2004 00:41 (twenty-one years ago)
Wow. Well said.
And my guess is that formally, he's maybe aiming closer to the old medieval genre of the dream-vision than he is to the novel (that's what I meant in the comment several layers above this one)--weirdly shifting scenes, plot mostly advanced by dialogue and description of setting/"feel," etc.
― Phil Christman, Saturday, 10 April 2004 02:59 (twenty-one years ago)
― Carol Robinson (carrobin), Monday, 12 April 2004 20:44 (twenty-one years ago)
He'd got as far as answering the late Victorian pessimism, as he says, of Schopenhauer and Whistler with the idea of order and chaos being two sides of the same coin, but only tentatively approached the real problem of a just God. For that reason, and getting back to the original question, "Thursday" may not really be Chesterton's masterpiece, as Gardner's edition calls it (my vote would go to his epic poem "The White Horse.") I still think it's a remarkable book, though, and, yes, a work of genius (but then I want to say that of nearly everything he wrote).
― Paul Bonner, Monday, 19 April 2004 21:19 (twenty-one years ago)
how do you feel about the father brown stories?
― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 00:06 (twenty-one years ago)
― derrick (derrick), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 08:33 (twenty-one years ago)
― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Tuesday, 20 April 2004 09:39 (twenty-one years ago)
― Paul Bonner, Wednesday, 21 April 2004 16:58 (twenty-one years ago)
― Mikey G (Mikey G), Thursday, 22 April 2004 07:45 (twenty-one years ago)
While discussing this book at bookclub last night we were evacuated from the pub by the bomb squad.
― Mikey G (Mikey G), Thursday, 29 April 2004 08:31 (twenty-one years ago)