Typical Chesterton, in these twisted detective stories, the sane are usually mad and the mad, sane. The Sherlock Holmes type detective always gets it wrong, but his crazy sidekick gets it right every time. Perhaps Chesterton thought he was the only sane person in the world? Or at least he seems to have felt that the world was being slowly taken over by crazyness. There are no conspiracies, though; in this book, things are always simpler, lighter, less dark, than they seem.
Download my free non-DRM Mobi/Kindle version here (click).
Quotes:
Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small, neat villa, very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea.
He saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing book.
"Bosh," he said. "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions ? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.
"I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?"
"As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex," he said, "I have never been forcibly dressed up as an old woman, and made to take part in a crime in the character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before."
The chances of life are many, and it may doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many improbable.
No comments:
Post a Comment