On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.

The damned and the blessed

Dante’s Comedy has three parts, but people commonly read only Inferno. I can somewhat understand why—Inferno is dramatic, fast-paced, and gossipy, with passages of seemingly straightforward horror. I think modern readers can also mistake Dante’s meditation on sin for salacious wallowing. But even if they read it in good faith, those who read only Inferno shortchange themselves.

I had already read the Comedy several times by the time I took Classical and Medieval Lit as an elective in college. (The chance to read my favorite book for credit was one reason I took it.) I’ve always been interested in structure as a part of storytelling, but it was in this class that my professor first drew my attention specifically to Dante’s use of parallelism across the three parts of the Comedy.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Michael Palma’s new complete translation of the Comedy and began Purgatorio last night. In canto II, Dante kneels to wash the smut of hell from his face—a requirement before he can enter Purgatory—and encounters a shipload of saved souls arriving to begin their purgation. They’re singing Psalm 114 as a hymn of deliverance and, before Dante can speak, greet him:

. . . with every face
turned toward us, the new people raised the cry:
“You there, do you know this mountain? If you do,
then show us the right road to climb it by.”

These souls are joyful and eager.

The contrast with the vestibule of hell, which parallels it in Inferno III, could not be more striking. There, instead of singing, there is pure, unrelenting, cacophonous noise. (“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end,” Lewis’s Screwtape asserts.) Instead of greeting Dante, the damned are too consumed with their tortures to do anything but flee the wasps that sting them. And where the souls arriving in Purgatory have a goal and direction, the damned run in circles—the central image of Inferno—forever.

The contrast extends through both books. In Purgatorio, souls repeatedly speak to Dante before they are spoken to. In canto IV, where I left off last night, the soul of Belacqua actually calls out to Dante and Virgil to get their attention; they wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. The redeemed are as eager to share how God has saved them as they are to begin their sanctifying journey up the mountain. Here’s Manfred, a secular ruler who was excommunicated by multiple popes and only repented as he lay dying on the battlefield, in canto III:

After two mortal wounds had done for me,
weeping, I placed myself into the care
of Him who gives forgiveness willingly.
My sins were horrible beyond compare,
but the arms of Infinite Goodness open wide,
and all who return to It are gathered there.

The shades of the damned in Inferno, by contrast, are famously reluctant to give their names and are often identified by other souls out of pure spite. Grace gives direction and continues to unify and open, even after death; sin, aimless, turns in on itself and closes, especially after death.

Dante is one of the rare writers who can make goodness desirable, not least through contrast. After the thirty-odd cantos of ever deepening evil in Inferno, the opening of Purgatorio is the same splash of cool dew that cleanses Dante’s face. That tiny moment—a single tercet of dialogue—in which the new arrivals ask Dante where they must go to find the path upward filled me with an inexpressible yearning for grace.

Again, if you only read Inferno, you miss more than you might guess.

The King of Kings

We were too late for Easter, but last weekend my three older kids and I finally saw The King of Kings, a new animated movie about the life of Christ from Angel Studios.

I admit I was skeptical of the project when I first learned about it. The King of Kings is based on The Life of Our Lord, a posthumously published retelling of selected stories from the Gospels by Charles Dickens, of all people, and Dickens appears in and narrates the movie. I also have to admit that I’m a bit wary of Angel Studios, not only because I’m reflexively and mulishly suspicious of popularity but because much of their work, based what I’ve read about their prestige projects like Cabrini and Bonhoeffer and what I’ve seen of “The Chosen,” strikes me as slick but hollow. I’d be glad to be wrong. I’m certainly glad I took the kids to see The King of Kings.

The movie begins, startlingly, with Ebenezer Scrooge in the cemetery, insisting to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he has repented and changed. When noisy children interrupt him, we discover that we’re watching Dickens give a live one-man performance of A Christmas Carol in London sometime in the mid-1840s. The noisy children are Charles Jr, Mary, and the youngest (at the time), Walter. The King Arthur-obsessed Walter proves particularly troublesome, disrupting Dickens’s reading until his father shouts at him and confiscates his toy sword.

At home, Dickens and his wife Catherine put the older children to bed and Dickens takes Walter into the family library to talk things over. He gives Walter’s sword back and begins to tell him about the true story of the king who inspired Arthur. What follows is a quick, thematically-oriented tour of the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem, through some of his ministry, and finally his death and resurrection.

Any movie revisiting such familiar stories must have an unusual angle to make them fresh again. Many of the rote, stagey Biblical epics era of the 1950s and 60s are forgotten today because they never improved upon what The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur did. The King of Kings, to my surprise, brilliantly used Dickens to narrow the focus of the film and tease important but easily overlooked themes out of it.

By starting off with a Victorian boy’s love of King Arthur, The King of Kings takes Christ’s rule as its central theme, and every part of the story portrayed onscreen supports and expands on this. Christ’s birth was the birth of a king, resisted by a rival king. Each miracle shown in the film demonstrates his authority over some part of creation—his kingdom. Beginning with his healing of a blind man and following with the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, casting out Legion from the demoniac of Gadara, healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, raising Lazarus from the dead and, finally, rising from the dead himself, they also show an unmistakable escalation in his claims to rule.

A parallel theme is the irony of Christ’s lordship. Walter, like those anticipating the Messiah’s rule two millennia ago, expects something else in a king. Born in a stable, followed by a council of fishermen, scorned, humiliated, and killed—at every step, Christ’s life upends those expectations. You have heard it said, but I tell you…

Even the film’s odd starting point—the end of Dickens’s Christmas Carol—proves aptly chosen. The King of Kings begins with repentance among snowy tombs and ends with Jesus leaving a tomb having conquered death and made redemption possible. The writing, by director Seong-ha Jang, is simple but brilliantly effective.

Something else that pleased me: The King of Kings was made with children in mind and is kid-appropriate, but it does not sand all of the rough edges off the Gospel accounts. Christ clearly suffers on the cross and endures relentless mockery from the crowd. The film also includes things I’ve seen in very few kids’ books and no other animated version of the story. Not only are the demoniac and Legion here, so are the pigs into which Christ casts the demons. And following the feeding of the five thousand, when some of the crowd talk about making him king on the spot, the film includes Christ’s sobering note that many of the people following him are doing so for material reasons, not because they recognize in him the Son of God. This is not merely a feel-good Sunday School story, but a challenge.

Technically, the film is fine, better than a lot of similar independent animated features. Limitations in the animation show occasionally, but the characters and environments are nicely designed—some of the disciples have a nice Rankin-Bass claymation look to them—and the directing inventively supports the story. A series of flashbacks to the earlier miracles during the crucifixion works especially well, with Walter imagining himself as Peter sinking into the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving him only to sink himself. The King of Kings may not be on the same level as Pixar or Disney, but the director and animators did a wonderful job making sure the visuals were part of the story and not merely the necessary visual means of telling it.

The voicework is also good, with Kenneth Branagh’s narration as Dickens being the backbone of the film, Oscar Isaac as a subtle, understated Jesus, and many smaller parts filled by big names for a scene or two—Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, and Forest Whitaker as Peter, for example. But the chief strength of the movie is its story and the manner in which the filmmakers, a South Korean animation team led by Seong-ho Jang, have chosen to tell it.

The King of Kings is not an exhaustive cartoon version of the life of Christ, but through the thoughtful selection of stories that resonate with each other, it offers a surprisingly and wonderfully deep meditation on how Christ transformed what kingship means while clearly demonstrating who the true king is.

Star Wars as a religious experience

Sunday, for May the Fourth, my in-laws took our family to see The Empire Strikes Back with the score performed live by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. The best Star Wars movie, the best Star Wars score, live—it was great. The orchestra performed with flawless timing and great power. I didn’t think I could appreciate John Williams’s work more than I already did, but hearing the entire Empire score in concert revealed yet more of his genius.

The main draw, of course, was the movie and the orchestra, but I was also struck by the audience. The event took place not in the concert hall or theatre at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville but in Bon Secours Wellness Arena (still the Bi-Lo Center to me), with a crowd of several thousand. I fully expected wackiness—people chanting lines of dialogue back at the movie, hooting and hollering, loudly snacking, and running around in costumes during the movie.

Instead, it was one of the best filmgoing experiences of my life. The audience interacted—cheering twice, once at “No, do or do not; there is no try” and again at “I am your father”—and laughed appreciatively at some of the humor, but the mood, to a startling degree, was one of reverence.

I can’t think of the last time I saw such a large group of people sitting still, paying attention, alert and undistracted. Few people left or walked around during the movie. I didn’t see people on their phones and didn’t hear ringtones or text alerts. I didn’t even notice people talking or whispering. Even the children, some very young, were well behaved. It could be that they were taking a cue from the grownups—something important is happening, something worth our attention.

As it happens, English has a word for giving appropriate attention to something that deserves it—worship, from the Old English worðscip, “the condition of being worthy.” Our idea of worship is severely atrophied. Worship is behaving toward something, especially in the matter of attention and respect, in a manner that demonstrates its worth. The audience Sunday knew that intuitively and acted accordingly, showing, as a group, the esteem in which they hold the movie.

I’m not saying the folks watching The Empire Strikes Back with me Sunday were “worshipping” Star Wars in the narrow way we use the word now; I’m saying I haven’t seen such a truly worshipful attitude toward anything in a long time. That it came along for a popcorn space adventure—which happens to be one of the best movies ever made—is interesting.

In a nice coincidence, this week The Rewatchables dropped a long, long two-part episode on the original 1977 Star Wars. (No, I’m not calling it A New Hope.) Twice during the course of the discussion, Sean, one of the regular guests, makes the point that the Star Wars phenomenon rose during a downturn in religious adherence. He doesn’t make any arguments as to which caused which but my experience Sunday made one thing clear: people are starving for the religious in their lives, and Star Wars meets that need in a way many other overtly religious things are not right now.

Necessary caveats: the sociology of American religiosity is fraught with controversy, rival bodies of statistics, and hairsplitting distinctions, and Star Wars is a relentlessly, cold-bloodedly commercial product—now more than ever. But…

But the audience at Sunday’s concert keeps coming back to me. It was like Easter mass in Notre Dame at the height of the Middle Ages, a congregation of pilgrims and local parishioners turned together in adoration toward the altar, complete with music inspired by and inspiring religious awe. It was clearly, in the manner revealingly described by James KA Smith in You Are What You Love, a liturgy, an act of worship.

It was a marvelous experience on many levels. But I’ve been wondering ever since: what would it take to bring that kind of worshipfulness back to the things that are actually worth it?

Further notes on Nosferatu

Willem Dafoe as Prof von Franz in Nosferatu (2024)

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu a lot since I first watched it. I managed to get a short summary of my thoughts down in my “2024 in movies” year-in-review, but here are some more oddments and reflections I’ve had since.

Outside reading

Writing at National Review, Jack Butler, whose opinions I respect, “expected to be wowed but was merely entertained.” This is almost the opposite of my reaction, not least since I found Nosferatu too spiritually oppressive, too uncompromising in its presentation of the twisted, predatory, consuming nature of sin and evil, to be entertaining.

Nevertheless, Butler makes a good point earlier in his short review: “one character literally invites the demonic into her life,” he notes, followed by the pointed parenthetical “(Be careful what you ‘manifest,’ kids!)”

At his UnTaking Substack, my friend Danny Anderson contends with two misreadings of Nosferatu, and along the way makes this incisive point about Eggers’s meticulous quest not merely to capture the fashions and hairstyles of past times—those are the easy parts—but the inside of people:

In the end, I do think that Holmes is correct in his focus on Eggers’ attraction to the past and the metanarratives that once inscribed meaning onto life. This is what I admire most about his work, in fact. His films create worlds that shouldn’t still exist. They are anachronisms. He re-creates the mind of the past, not just images. The confrontation with that mind, which is alien and beyond our modern comprehension, is part of what makes his art valuable.

Agreed. We need to be confronted with past minds more often than we are. This is one of the things old books are good for, but since fewer and fewer people read, the need for such movies is growing. May Eggers’s tribe increase.

A few other points that I’ve been mulling, especially points that have proven controversial:

Nosferatu and Christianity

One line of criticism against Eggers’s Nosferatu has accused it of watering down or eliminating Christian elements present in Stoker’s original. I’m not as familiar with Dracula—the fons et origo of all this vampire stuff—as I should be, but I thought the evidence of Nosferatu itself is ambiguous. Crosses and crucifixes are both prominent and subtle throughout, but it’s not clear, as I’ve seen several critics online point out, that they do much to repel or impede Count Orlok. It’s possible that he only appears in rooms in, say, the Harding house where there are no religious decorations, but I didn’t pay close enough attention to be sure.

More pointedly, I’ve seen Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz accused of being a paganized Van Helsing. I don’t think so. The doctor who introduces von Franz name-drops at least one Christian occultist (in the early modern sense of someone who studies hidden forces, like magic and magnetism), and late in the film von Franz instinctively makes the sign of the cross.

Von Franz is also from Switzerland, from the southerly and more predominantly Catholic regions of German-speaking Europe. In this way he’s a contrast to the other characters, the Hutters and Hardings and Dr Sievers, who come from the fictional Wisburg, which is clearly a North Sea or Baltic port city—the Germany of Luther and Kant. Prof von Franz is coded from the get-go as more attuned to the eminent but hidden and the power of the liturgical. A nice touch by Eggers.

It’s not explicit, but I think von Franz is meaningfully Christian, albeit a Christian steeped in esoterica—but not of the Faustian variety.

But the strongest showing for Christianity belongs to two groups—the Romanian peasantry and the Orthodox nuns who nurse Thomas Hutter back to health. Out of all the characters in the film, they are the ones who most clearly understand what Orlok is and what it takes to resist him. Further, their explicit affiliation of Orlok with Satan is allowed to stand unchallenged. They, like Prof von Franz, know what they’re talking about and suffer no illusions.

Orlok, by moving from Transylvania to northern Germany is escaping the “superstitious” who know what he is to live among the “enlightened” who are easy pickings. A pretty powerful statement by itself.

Ellen’s sacrifice

The final act, in which Ellen makes herself available to her predator as carnal bait, luring him to their deaths, didn’t quite land for me. As I put it in my year-in-review, “I thought the ending stumbled a bit.” That’s the best I could put it at the time, but I’ve read and talked to other viewers who had the same sense of unease about it. As I put it in e-mail conversation with one of y’all, is Ellen’s final action a Christ-like self-sacrifice or an act of pagan expiation?

I think it has to be the latter. It was Ellen, after all, who first transgressed by summoning Orlok as a child. (See Butler above.) She was lonely and ignorant, but circumstances play no role in the pagan understanding of transgression. Whole mythologies have grown out of this conception of sin as crossing a line. By giving in to Orlok Ellen allows his appetite to consume him—and her. There is no eucatastrophe, only the methodical, inevitable outworking of the process she initiated years before. She has not received grace so much as restored balance.

This undercuts whatever is going on with the Orthodox nuns or the Catholic von Franz. However subtly and powerfully Nosferatu evokes their pre-Enlightenment liturgical Christianity, grace in this story ultimately has nothing to do with defeating evil. There’s an unfulfilled yearning for grace here. Eggers ends up framing Orlok’s defeat as an act of independent will, but under the influence of Orlok, how independent can Ellen be, really?

As clearly as Eggers can perceive and expose evil—and there’s no one else in Hollywood today who sees it this clearly—he seems to lack a countervailing sense of the good. Something to think and pray about.

Minutiae

• As I’ve said to a couple of y’all, I’ve been amazed at how totally my tolerance for bad things happening to children in movies has evaporated over the last several years.

• Relatedly, the role of the Harding family as mere cannon fodder for Orlok and the utter lack of redemption for Friedrich felt like a misstep into gratuitous shock.

• An uncharacteristic bit of internet nit-picking for me: If both Thomas Hutter and Prof von Franz know that Orlok sleeps in his coffin during the day—which Thomas knows because he came within a hair’s breadth of killing him and ending the nightmare earlier—why do they wait until night to go to his house outside Wisburg? Why not go directly there and stake him in the middle of the day? Perhaps I’m forgetting something.

• Finally, I can’t saw enough good things about the cast, but let me specifically point out Ralph Ineson as the unfortunate Dr Sievers. A lesser actor would have made him an unthinking period quack. Ineson makes him a thoughtful student of medical science who is doing his best against something impervious to his tools. This is his third role in an Eggers film and I hope the two keep working together.

Concluding unscientific postscript

I’m grateful to Chet for the e-mail correspondence that helped me give a shape to some of these thoughts, observations, and intuitions.

Nosferatu is a great movie but, again, not mere entertainment. It’s much more, but that doesn’t make it fun. I hope to watch it again someday, and to see more in it. But that will probably be a while.

Screwtape reviews a book

It isn’t often that you can say unequivocally that an artistic judgment is wrong. De gustibus, etc. And yet here are coauthors Philip and Carol Zaleski in their quadruple-biography The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings discussing CS Lewis’s 1942 novel The Screwtape Letters. After half a paragraph of tepid praise, they write:

For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begun to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric. The Screwtape Letters is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

N.b. most editions of The Screwtape Letters come in at or below 200 pages even with reader-friendly large type.

This is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. Should one not take swipes at psychoanalysis, one of the stupidest and most damaging theories to run riot in the last century and a half? And sophomoric? “The Miller’s Tale” and Candide are sophomoric. Screwtape is funny but treats its subject seriously, since its subject is ultimately damnation and salvation, a fact underscored by the time and place in which it was written. One infers from Screwtape’s comments that the story takes place, in human terms, during the Blitz, and it is made clear in the final letter that our human protagonist, the object of the devils’ torments, is killed by German bombs—a real fear for the book’s original readers, and one Lewis treats reverently. And artistically, Screwtape is a model of concision. Lewis gets exactly the right amount out of the book’s conceit and epistolary format and ends it with a chilling bang.

And this is not even to address the insight—into everything from prideful self-delusion to the danger of snark to simple carnal lust—that Lewis’s topsy-turvy perspective offers. Its carefully observed portrait of human nature is rightly Screwtape’s greatest appeal and gives it its most lasting power. The attentive reader will see himself more clearly having read The Screwtape Letters, and probably won’t like the view.

I could go on. One suspects that for these authors, Ivy League-connected editors of anthologies of “spiritual writing” for many years, Lewis’s bracing devil’s-eye view of temptation, one in which he dramatizes firm orthodox opinions and depicts devils as real and predatory and sin as real and damning, is rather strong drink. Their suggestion that an unfunny pamphlet-length version of Screwtape would be better only reinforces that impression.

This critique smacks of distaste rather than any legitimate line of literary or artistic criticism. And one can feel the authors’ disapproval when they continue by noting that

The public . . . roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works. The Manchester Guardian (February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while The Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

The Zaleskis’ book is a finely researched and written biography—though despite invoking “the Inklings” it focuses, predictably, only on Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Where is our Hugo Dyson or Roger Lancelyn Green biography? Warnie Lewis has only recently gotten one.) But the Zaleskis’ judgments on specific works are lacking. That passage on Screwtape has bugged me since I first read it nine years ago, and their treatment of Tolkien betrays similarly poor understanding and judgment.

This morning, realizing that I hadn’t cracked open The Fellowship in almost as many years, I put it in a box to trade in at the local used book store. But The Screwtape Letters is still on my shelf.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Chestertober, my informal, monthlong exploration of GK Chesterton’s fiction, concludes with his best novel and the one that has always been my favorite: The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Where to begin? I think with a favorite line from Flannery O’Connor, who once wrote that “A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.” Any time I reflect on that line, this is one of the few books that comes to mind, vividly and specifically.

The Man Who Was Thursday is Gabriel Syme, an English poet who, when the novel begins, is at a garden party in a fashionable London suburb. There he finds himself in conversation with the beautiful Rosamund and her testy brother Lucian, who, like Syme, is a poet. He takes himself dreadfully seriously and the puckish Syme can’t resist goading him. Finally, dared to prove that he really means what he says in his nihilistic modernist poetry, Lucian reveals that he is an anarchist. He invites Syme to a meeting of his anarchist terrorist cell that very night.

“Your offer,” Syme says, “is too idiotic to refuse.”

Syme and Lucian arrive early and, just before the others enter, Syme repays Lucian for his dangerous revelation with one of his own—he is an undercover cop.

In a masterfully suspenseful scene, Lucian, who is nominated for a position on the supreme anarchist council under the codename Thursday, attempts to downplay the violence of their group. Syme denounces him—the path to success among radicals—and is elected the new Thursday, at which point he is whisked downriver to Westminster. There, at a luxurious breakfast on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square, Syme meets the five other members of the council and the man behind them all, Sunday.

The other members—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—are all grotesques. One is a cadaverous German professor named de Worms, another a crooked French aristocrat, another, one Dr Bull, a man who grins ominously from behind opaque sunglasses. But their leader is the most frightening of all. Sunday, an enormous man, a giant who fills Syme’s senses with his overpowering presence, announces that he has uncovered a spy among their number. Syme thinks he has failed just as he’s begun, but it turns out to be one of the other members, a Pole named Gogol who tears off his wig and beard to reveal a Cockney policeman underneath. After threatening Gogol with death, Sunday sends him on his way.

Sunday then reveals the council’s plot: the Tsar is en route to Paris for a meeting with the President of France. Wednesday, the French marquis, is to blow them up with a bomb when they meet in three days. Syme’s goals at this point become clear: stop the assassination and bring down Sunday—the former because he is a policeman, the latter because Sunday terrifies him.

But as Syme leaves Leicester Square he discerns that he is being followed. After failing to elude his tail, he turns and confronts him. It is Friday, the elderly Professor de Worms, who insistently asks whether Syme is a policeman. When Syme finally denies it, the professor is crestfallen: “‘That’s a pity,’ he said, ‘because I am.’”

With astonishment and frustration, Syme and Professor de Worms realize that three of the seven anarchists at the council meeting were actually undercover detectives. Only their ignorance of the fact prevented them from moving against Sunday on the spot. They determine to stop Sunday’s plot together by forcing Saturday, Dr Bull, to reveal the marquis’s plans for carrying out the bombing. Once they find and interrogate the inscrutable Dr Bull, a scene in which the hapless Syme and Professor de Worms struggle to break through the man’s defenses, it turns out that he, too, is a policeman.

From this point on, the three race to cross the Channel and find and stop the marquis—who turns out to be a policeman.

One by one, every member of the supreme anarchist council, the organization working to overthrow the entire world, has been revealed to be an undercover agent of the forces of law and order. And one by one, each reveals that he was recruited by the same man—a Scotland Yard official who questioned them in a completely darkened room in which, despite their inability to see him, they felt awed and overpowered by his presence. Each has derived an extra measure of strength for his work from remembering that interview. Each wants to please their unseen boss by defeating Sunday.

After repeatedly cheating death by fighting a duel against an expert swordsman and fleeing a zombie-like mob in northern France, Syme and his allies, eventually including Gogol and the menacing council secretary, who is second only to Sunday himself, decide to turn the tables on Sunday by returning to England and confronting him.

“This is more cheerful,” said Dr. Bull; “we are six men going to ask one man what he means.”

“I think it is a bit queerer than that,” said Syme. “I think it is six men going to ask one man what they mean.”

What they discover defies expectations or explanation.

“A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and it continues to escape you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Likewise, The Man Who Was Thursday defies easy summary or explanation. It’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away, but I’ve tried to avoid spoiling important episodes, major plot points, and most especially the ending. It’s also hard to describe, period. See again that quotation from Flannery O’Connor.

A good place to begin is that subtitle: A Nightmare. The subtitle, as I noted earlier this month, is easy to overlook, especially once one has started reading, but important for both stylistic and thematic reasons.

Artistically, Chesterton’s most effective tool in establishing a nightmare feeling, and the one that sets The Man Who Was Thursday most clearly apart from all of his other fiction, is pacing. This novel maintains a breakneck speed that creates a sense of barely controlled panic as crisis flows into crisis and surprise piles upon surprise. There is no lag or dull spot and Chesterton metes out his surprises and twists expertly. Kingsley Amis, in a line commonly reprinted as a blurb on paperback copies, called The Man Who Was Thursday “the most thrilling book I have ever read.” High praise, and well earned.

The book’s atmosphere and tone are also crucial. Chesterton evokes better and more subtly than any other writer the feeling of being in a nightmare. Anyone who has dreamt of being chased will know the feeling. Over and over again, Syme is followed or chased by enemies of obscure purpose who always keep up with him no matter how hard he strives to get away. And, as in a dream, the familiar—Chesterton, a lifelong Cockney, sets the first half of the book in a believable and realistic London—mutates almost imperceptibly. Under the influence of this paranoia, which prefigures that of the political thrillers of John Buchan and his successors, home becomes a foreign battlefield, nothing appears quite right, and the human face and form both prove horrifyingly changeable.

But alongside the pursuit and paranoia of the nightmare is the reversal. Enemies turn out to be allies, being chased turns into chasing, disguises do not conceal, and, in the climax, the villain flees his accusers only to welcome them. The reversal, the inversion, the topsy-turvy turning of the world on its head—this is one of Chesterton’s recurring motifs and the great load-bearing structure of this novel.

It is also the key to Sunday, who is both a threat and the solution to the threat, both feared and trusted, both hated and loved, both a destroyer of the world and its creator and preserver.

I can say little more without revealing too much. The Man Who Was Thursday can be described, even spoiled, but must be read. It has to be dreamt.

When Chesterton published this book in 1908, he had taken a live issue, the waves of anarchist terrorism and assassination in both Europe and America at that time, and used it to explore doubt and despair and madness. The plot, in a way hard to explain but easy to describe, provides an answer by rejecting the question. On this read-through, as I read the novel’s concluding scenes, with Sunday and the six policemen of his council reunited, I thought of a passage from Chesterton’s “Introduction to the Book of Job” in which Chesterton describes how Job, after all his questions, finds himself

suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Chesterton’s message is all the more powerful because, unlike some of the other novels we’ve read this month, it is never made explicit, much less preached.

I’ve read elsewhere that readers wrote to Chesterton to tell him that The Man Who Was Thursday had saved them from despair. I can believe it. This time through, my fourth or fifth in about fifteen years, I finished it feeling steadied and content, something I had not expected to get out of this rereading. I finally understood. The Man Who Was Thursday is not just witty, surrealist fun and genuinely thrilling espionage action, it is an allegory that strikes to the heart through the imagination.

Our world is no more settled or peaceful than it was in Chesterton’s time. If you’re feeling that, especially if you’re feeling that right now because of the forces at work to destroy civilization—whichever forces you think they might be—The Man Who Was Thursday may be the nightmare you need. A paradox worthy of its author.

GKC and me

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I’ve enjoyed and admired since reading his experimental historical novel The Wake almost a decade ago, posted an appreciation of Chesterton and The Everlasting Man on his Substack. The Everlasting Man vies with Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday as my favorite Chesterton book so I was interested in Kingsnorth’s thoughts, but it’s his introduction, in which he describes how he came to read Chesterton, that I found most arresting.

Briefly, Kingsnorth discovered Chesterton almost by accident as a godless environmental activist, finding in his work—beginning with The Napoleon of Notting Hill—a salve for the “push-and-pull of apparently conflicting tendencies and views” inside himself. He learned to love Chesterton for his localism and rejection of both socialism and capitalism but had no time for Chesterton’s Christianity. Only after his own conversion did he find that it was Chesterton’s Christianity that undergirded and gave shape to the rest.

Though the specifics are different, the trajectory of Kingsnorth’s story resonates with me—as does the feeling that Chesterton was, at first, a private discovery: “I liked G. K. Chesterton before anyone else did.”

My first GKC—The paperback reprint of Orthodoxy that I read in college

My own story with Chesterton begins, like I suspect many people’s does, with CS Lewis. I started reading Lewis as a freshman in college and somehow became aware of Chesterton as an influence on him. When I stumbled onto an Image paperback of Orthodoxy in Barnes and Noble one day as a sophomore or junior, I snapped it up. At some point I bought matching paperbacks of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. I still have all three.

I ended up reading Orthodoxy the same summer I took my deep dive into the Icelandic sagas, the reading of which resulted in No Snakes in Iceland a few years later—that was one formative summer—and read the other two as a burgeoning medievalist sometime before I graduated.

At Clemson I dug into The Everlasting Man, which I even managed to work into my master’s thesis, and from there I read everything else I could get my hands on—What’s Wrong with the World, Heretics, Eugenics and Other Evils, Magic, A Short History of England, Charles Dickens, The Ballad of the White Horse, the Autobiography, Father Brown, and criticism and essays galore. Chesterton’s work startled, amused, confused, and stretched me. I marveled at his range. I collected quotations by the bushel. I remember testing the longsuffering of a friend by texting—in the primordial texting days, with only a ten-digit keypad to type on—a whole paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils during an argument.

Like Gabriel Syme in The Man Who Was Thursday, I had deeply felt but essentially shapeless and purposeless convictions in college, and the chaotic environment of opinion and argument into which I was thrust after a pretty tranquil upbringing as well as personal upheaval in grad school proved difficult for me. Lewis helped over those years, as did Peter Kreeft. Chesterton continued their work and challenged me even more than they did. He tested many of my assumptions, forcing me to rethink or abandon some and affirming and reinforcing others. He helped give my beliefs a consistent shape. It took years for me to recognize just how much he changed me.

Only much, much later did I become aware of the subculture—or, when I’m feeling less charitable, the industry—that has grown up around Chesterton. And by then that world’s Chesterton didn’t feel much like the Chesterton I had sat at the feet of for a decade. Kingsnorth nods unmistakably toward the kind of Chesterton cosplayer I’m thinking of. I’m not knocking those Chesterton fans—I’m glad he still has enough readers to keep his books in print—but I feel like we’re adoring different Chestertons. Theirs is all tweedy whimsy and cigar smoke and strained cheerfulness and the same endlessly repeated decontextualized quotations and really bad attempts to write like Chesterton. (Don’t attempt to write like him, ever.) Their Chesterton strikes me as a cartoon, a simplification, without the thread of darkness and lifelong self-examination running through the real man.

And yet, their Chesterton is present in the real Chesterton. He contains multitudes. Like the undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday, we’re all pursuing the same gigantic, surprising, seemingly unknowable man, and there is healthy unity in that. As Kingsnorth puts it, “I don’t resent their incursion on my turf, though. Indeed, I welcome them into the fold of true believers.”

But that feeling of difference and my natural un-clubbableness has kept Chesterton a somewhat private love. Which has, with a completely appropriate sense of paradox, made it that much better when I discover that a new acquaintance is also a fan. To bring Lewis back in, he wrote that “[t]he typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too?’” That feeling is a joy when shared with anyone who stumbled into Chesterton the way I did, and cherishes his work the way I do.

I greatly enjoyed getting Kingsnorth’s perspective, especially his story. You can read all of his reflections on GKC as well as his takeaways from The Everlasting Man here. You can read his conversion story, which came as a great and welcome surprise to me when I stumbled across it, at First Things here.

Chestertober concludes later this week with The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The subtitle is important. Stay tuned for that.

The Flying Inn

When I began this monthlong celebration of Chesterton’s fiction with his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I noted that the novel balances his storytelling capabilities and his love of ideas in combat perfectly, unlike some of his other fiction in which the ideas drown the narrative. Today Chestertober enters its final week with a museum-quality example of a Chesterton story overpowered by its ideas, the 1914 satire The Flying Inn.

Set in the near future, The Flying Inn begins with a peace settlement between Britain and her allies and the Ottoman Empire at the end of a long war. Though presented as a treaty among equals, it soon becomes clear that the Turks have had the better of the agreement, as the treaty obligates the British to abide by Muslim religious laws—specifically the prohibition of alcohol. The British signatory to the treaty, Lord Ivywood, a cold and unimaginative bureaucratic tyrant, immediately enacts the ban through roundabout legislation related to inns and pubs. Another signatory, the Irish naval hero Patrick Dalroy, resigns in protest and returns to Britain disillusioned but not defeated.

Ivywood and his cronies’ method is to ban not alcohol itself, but to require a public sign—as for a pub or inn—to be displayed outside any establishment serving alcohol. They then eliminate all the inn signs in Britain.

All but one—the sign of The Old Ship. This is an inn run by Humphrey Pump, an old friend of Dalroy’s, and when the ban goes into effect Dalroy, enraged, pries up the sign, takes a wheel of cheese and the one remaining cask of rum in The Old Ship, and hits the road. If the law says you can only serve alcohol wherever there’s an inn sign, Dalroy ensures there will always be both.

While Dalroy and “Hump” travel the countryside between the fictional beach town of Pebbleswick and London, an Islamic “Prophet of the Moon” named Misysra Ammon goes to work on the people, attempting to convince them of the rightness of prohibition and the cultural and historical superiority of Islam. The people, including the object of Ivywood’s intentions, Lady Joan Brett, mostly giggle, but Misysra finds a better reception among the elite, who need little encouragement to indulge their power-hungry vanity, their oikophobia, and their superficial love of the foreign.

The bulk of The Flying Inn is an old-fashioned picaresque, with Dalroy and Hump falling into slapstick scrapes involving pro-Prohibition rallies, vegetarian banquets, diet cranks, modern art, and a poet who has a conversion experience. Everywhere they go, Dalroy plants his sign, Hump starts pouring, and a grateful crowd gathers—to the befuddlement and humiliation of some establishment figure who tries to stop it.

Ivywood, in multiple attempts to crush Dalroy, fiddles with the law, amending it to enforce prohibition through legal nitpicking. Dalroy outmaneuvers him every time, and between his growing folk-hero status and popular outrage at the treaty that has visited an unwanted theocracy upon England, public opinion turns on Ivywood. The thrilling climactic action, with a mob of ordinary people marching on Ivywood’s stately country house—which, imperceptibly, has come to resemble a Turkish palace complete with harem—is a great revolt against the remote, all-powerful, but incompetent tyranny. The people, thirsting, finally call it to account.

The Flying Inn has an arresting hook—Islamic law imposed on Britain!—but while that has generated some comment and notoriety a hundred years after the fact online, it is not really Chesterton’s point. Neither is the alcohol at the center of the story, which misled the novel’s first batch of critics. If The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a hymn to the local, The Flying Inn is a populist anthem—in the best sense of a tribute to the people and a condemnation of those who would presume to rule them.

Chesterton’s target, the aloof, bloodless, but cruel Lord Ivywood, won’t confront Dalroy but tries to work behind the scenes, slipping in new regulations here and ratcheting up his program of reform there, all without consulting the object of his schemes—the people. He is a stand-in for all the soft despots of modern progressive bureaucracy who treat the public as raw material to be shaped and nudged into compliance with a revolutionary vision, for their own good.

The abuses of know-it-alls in high places was a topic Chesterton returned to again and again, perhaps most ferociously in Eugenics and Other Evils. In the Eugenics movement, Chesterton saw an elite who, like Lord Ivywood prohibiting alcohol, strove to deprive ordinary people of one of their only joys in life—the gift of children. Their pursuit of some external ideal—the purity of Islam for Lord Ivywood, the purity of genetic hygiene for the Eugenicists—ends up destroying the little things that give life meaning.

And as with so many such despots, his chief targets are the simple good things that even the poor can enjoy. Ivywood sees an inn and thinks only of the alcohol, which he must prohibit in order to “help” and reform the people, but does not think of the networks of friends who gather there or the relief they feel to enjoy a drink with each other after work. In The Flying Inn, not only Lord Ivywood but all the other cranks in the book have made similar errors of priority. (Reading about Peaceways, the milk-drinking colony, or Lord Ivywood’s hypocritical vegetarian party, one thinks of Orwell’s critique of the diet obsessive as someone “willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase.”) It is Dalroy, the outlaw, who actually helps the people, not by providing alcohol but the occasion and excuse for community.

The Flying Inn has something important to say, one of Chesterton’s most enduring messages. But it does not work very well as a novel. Though filled with amusing episodes, fun takedowns of everything from modern art to the experts who can explain away anything, and a handful of colorful characters, it has a ragged, discursive structure and little forward momentum—a fact underscored by my rereading The Man Who Was Thursday for next week, a book that starts fast and never lets up. Lady Joan has little to do throughout, Misysra the prophet flits aimlessly in and out of the story, and many of the other characters are flat stand-ins for the movements and isms Chesterton wishes to critique. In The Flying Inn, the ideas are foremost, the story a distant second. Enjoy it though I did, of the novels by Chesterton that I’ve read, it is the weakest.

That said, it is still worth reading as a critique of managerial progressivism, of an elite that seeks to shield itself from accountability while manipulating the public, and the very notion of the nanny state. And, in Lord Ivywood, Chesterton has created one of his best villains, a prototype of all the tyrants of CS Lewis’s own near-future dystopia That Hideous Strength, who similarly cloak their control-freak inhumanity in gentleness and advancement, and all the smothering tyrants of our own time.

One wonders who our Dalroys will turn out to be, and whether our culture as it stands today is even capable of producing one among its legions of Ivywoods.

Manalive

Today Chestertober continues with perhaps the most overtly, characteristically, even stereotypically Chestertonian of all of Chesterton’s fiction, his 1912 comedy of ideas Manalive.

The entirety of Manalive takes place at Beacon House, a boarding house on a hill overlooking London. Here a variety of lodgers move comfortably through their lives, among them an heiress named Rosamund and her maid Mary Gray; Diana Duke, the niece of Beacon House’s imperious landlady; a young man named Arthur Inglewood, who nurses secret feelings for Diana; a dour Irish journalist named Michael Moon; a Jewish cynic named Moses Gould; and the successful and intelligent but utterly humorless Dr Herbert Warner. The bland, peaceful routines of Beacon House are disrupted by the arrival of Innocent Smith, an eccentric whose coming is heralded by a blast of evening wind that drives the residents indoors just as Smith throws his luggage over the back garden wall and clambers over into the yard.

Smith’s eccentricities do not stop there. A gigantic man with unkempt blond hair, he speaks in a torrent of disjointed allusions and metaphors and partial quotations and half-formed jokes, invites the other lodgers to a picnic which he hosts on the roof, and carries a large revolver in his bag.

Despite his strange arrival and effusive, off-putting manner, Smith quickly wins over most of the other lodgers. His overwhelming energy inspires Arthur to confess his feelings to Diana and ask her to marry him, Michael Moon to win back the affections of Rosamund, with whom he used to be in love, and Mary Gray to agree to marry Smith. Beacon House resounds to song and laughter as love is either kindled or relit, and as Smith and Mary prepare to elope in a cab. All is going well until Smith takes his revolver and shoots at Dr Warner.

Warner, who is already hostile to Smith, understandably objects and calls in an American criminologist to examine him. Warner means to have Smith declared insane and committed. Arthur and Michael rise to Smith’s defense, and Warner and Dr Pym, the criminologist, present new charges that Smith is not only insane but a burglar, a repeat attempted murderer, and a serial seducer and bigamist who has abandoned several wives.

The second half of the novel is a long trial held at Beacon House with Warner and Pym as prosecutors and Arthur and Michael as Smith’s defense. Chapter by chapter, Warner and Pym produce statements from Smith’s past that suggest a life of depravity and crime and Arthur and Michael counter with clarifying and exonerating testimony.

When Warner and Pym relate an incident from Smith’s university days in which he chased a professor out a window and shot at him—much like the incident with Warner—it turns out that the accusation is based entirely on the testimony of a witness. The professor himself never pressed charges or even complained. The professor, it turns out, was a scientific skeptic and pessimist who had become convinced that life was meaningless and worthless. Being shot at revealed to him, for the first time, life’s value, and he emerged from the incident a changed man. When Warner and Pym bring eyewitness testimony from a minister of the Church of England that Smith had once led him down a chimney into a house where he stole goods, it turns out that the house was Smith’s own.

And, in the climactic series of accusations and testimonies, in answer to the charge that Smith has led astray a series of young women all over England who agreed to elope with him and were never seen again, Arthur and Michael prove that all of these women, all along, have been Smith’s actual wife—and so is Mary Gray.

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

— GK Chesterton

Smith, from a place of despair as a young man, had plunged into the joy of rediscovery, of turning life on its head and seeing it from a fresh angle. He shoots at the despairing to make them want to live, burgles his own house in order to appreciate home, travels all the way around the world to discover his country as if it were a foreign and exotic land, and repeatedly loses and rescues his wife to keep the thrill of marriage alive.

In the conclusion, Smith is acquitted and waves a burning log from the roof of Beacon House—making the name literal—and, just as when he arrived, a great evening wind blows. In the midst of Arthur and Diana and Michael and Rosamund’s festivities, Smith and Mary disappear.

I first read Manalive many years ago and, though I enjoyed it and have enjoyed revisiting it, it is not my favorite of Chesterton’s novels. This is curious to me since, as I suggested in the introduction, it is a very characteristically Chestertonian entertainment. Light, frothy, energetic, with painterly descriptions throughout and a gallery of over-the-top characters who still manage to feel like real people. It also includes some of my favorite passages from all of Chesterton’s work, among them:

If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.

Often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing the family could settle. Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

Or this, one of Chesterton’s best, truest, and most often quoted lines:

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

And this, which speaks deeply to me:

I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.

I think what keeps me from loving Manalive is that Chesterton, for lack of a better way to put it, really leans into his Chestertonness here, almost to self-parody. It is too whimsical by half, a fact one has more of a chance to contemplate since it unfolds at novel length unlike, say, some similarly twee poems or short stories. And I think both form and structure present problems. This is a novel that desperately wants to be a play, as the single setting and very, very long trial scenes in the second half suggest. And as a play Manalive would be smashing, and probably use the repeated surprises of Innocent Smith’s topsy-turvy life to maximum effect. As a novel, it is only good.

“Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.”

— GK Chesterton

Again—it is good. Manalive might suffer in comparison to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with which we started the month, or The Man Who Was Thursday, with which I intend to end October, but it is still worth reading, and that is on its strengths not as a novel but as a fable.

Back in the summer I posted about Joseph Epstein’s thoughts on “the novel of ideas” in his book The Novel, Who Needs It? Drawing from sources as various as Ortega y Gasset, Northrop Frye, and Michael Oakeshott, Epstein argues that a proper novel is not straightforwardly about its ideas, concepts, theories, or ideologies, but allows any such underlying philosophy to be dramatized subtly through character relationships. As I noted later, there’s an element of snobbery to this narrowing definition, but there’s also an element of truth.

In Manalive, Chesterton’s ideas are clearly in control, and the pitched battle he constructs between the haughty and reductive scientism of Warner and Pym, who can explain away anything through biology, sociology, and psychology; the wry cynicism of Gould; the untested idealism of Arthur; the disillusion of Michael; and the pious wonder of Smith is more important than the characters themselves. That does not reduce Manalive’s value as a story, but just as the form suggests it is better suited to the stage, the role of each character as the stand-in for a philosophy of life makes it more of a fable.

And as a fable, Manalive is both moving and profound. Through the disruption of Chesterton’s greatest Holy Fool, who renews the minds of those who are open to befriending him, the residents of Beacon Hill are forced to reckon with truths they have up to this time ignored or actively fought against. Some of these are confoundingly simple: life is better than death, for example. When people say that Chesterton’s ideas are “more relevant than ever,” it is these most obvious, common sense ideas that they have in mind. Only these can fortify a soul against the madness of our age—another theme Chesterton explored repeatedly, and to which we’ll return.

Manalive is neither Chesterton’s best nor best-remembered novel, but it is a worthwhile read as distilled essence of Chesterton, especially if his non-fiction covering similar ground—What’s Wrong with the World, Eugenics and Other Evils, and his many, many essays—don’t appeal as strongly. Even with its artistic flaws, Manalive leaves the reader refreshed and revived, just as Innocent Smith would want, as well as wanting an Innocent Smith of our own to scare a mad and death-loving culture back to life.