Catholic and Loving it!

The book review I wrote recently for Faith Magazine is now online...

GK Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908

Around a hundred years ago The Times newspaper invited prominent authors of the time to submit articles under the title "What's wrong with the world?" GK Chesterton's response was as short as it was profound. "Dear Sirs," he wrote "I am". In reviewing this book it is tempting to employ a similar, albeit less metaphysical device: "Dear Sirs, Buy this book". I cannot leave things there. Not least because a hundred years later the use of "Dear Sirs" is likely to elicit a chorus of feminist outrage which compels me to add that any madams reading this would do well to buy this book as well (I'm sure that helped).

Reading Chesterton is a bit like watching Star Wars. Not those terrible new ones with the computer generated bunny but the original ones. Don't worry, I'm not about to go off on some tedious exposition about the force. What I mean is simply that the great works of Chesterton, books like Heretics, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man leave upon the reader the impression that they have joined the story as it draws to its conclusion or has already ended. Chesterton writes as a man who has been on a long journey. "There are two ways of getting home" he writes, "and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place".

The majority of Chesterton's best apologetic writing begins with his arrival at the place his journey finally came to an end, that is with Christian orthodoxy "as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago". He writes as a man who seems to come out of nowhere, as though he sprang into the world a fully formed thirty-four year old Catholic author and genius. The very idea that he might have been born or had parents seems almost absurd, like the idea of one's grandparents having once been babies. Yet, just as the original Star Wars films gave us a tantalising glimpse into the history of the main characters, so Chesterton leaves us in no doubt that his own childhood was of immense importance to the development of his ideas. Chesterton's emphasis on the importance of the nursery to his personal growth is surpassed only by how little he tells us about what he actually did there, or how he came to travel from the nursery to fame and his new found faith.

For fans of Chesterton, William Oddie's book Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is the long awaited prequel. Here thankfully, Chesterton and Star Wars part company. Unlike the rather disappointing Star Wars prequels, this book should be a delight to existing fans of Chesterton and newcomers alike. Oddie tells the story of the man from childhood to his life as a young adult, his marriage and emergence on to the public stage right through to the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908. This is not simply a novelization of a man's life. Often with books of this kind fanciful statements are made and we have only the author's word that they are true, but William Oddie has gone to remarkable lengths to research every aspect of Chesterton's life. We are treated to lengthy quotations from primary sources including eyewitness descriptions of the family home, unfinished stories Chesterton wrote as a very young child, a diary Chesterton kept as a boy and school report cards, right through to accounts of his wedding day and letters he wrote to his wife.

It would be a mistake though to think of this book as merely the story of the man. It is primarily the story of his ideas. Quoting extensively from Chesterton's poems, letters and articles (many previously unpublished) William Oddie guides us skilfully through the development of Chesterton's ideas, from the anti-clerical pessimism of his youth to his gradual drift towards orthodoxy and eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism. It is a delight to discover ideas in situ that are referred back to in his later works and to be shown the steps that led between them.

All in all this is a practical, well written, highly accessible book that belongs in the hands of everybody who has ever enjoyed the writing of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

James Preece
Hull