Chesterton and Evil by Mark Knight (review)

Abstract

YES, 36.2, 2oo6 279 Chesterton and Evil. By MARK KNIGHT. New York: Fordham University Press. 2004. $55. x+ I72 pp. ISBN o-8232-2309-4. Unlike other Edwardian thinkers, G. K. Chesterton still has a living reputation. Ca sual references to him, or allusions to his writings, crop up surprisingly often, while inNorth America he has something of a cult following, with two magazines devoted to his work and influence. Mark Knight's short book, the work of a British scho lar published by an American Catholic university press, fits into this pattern. It is, though, certainly not a cult book but a serious study of a topic where religious and literary questions intersect. Knight begins by recalling that in strict theological terms, as employed by Augustine and Aquinas, evil is literally nothing at all: it isprivatio boni, the lack of a proper good, as, for instance, blindness is the absence of the capa city to see. There is a certain unreal serenity about the idea of evil as emptiness and privation, which contrasts with the traditional efforts of moralists and preachers, and of writers and artists, either towarn against its dangers or to explore its imaginative resonance. For both parties evil (and still more, Evil) is likely to appear palpable and present. Chesterton, as Knight shows, was aman in love with creation. He valued har mony and order, not in an abstract neo-classical sense, but as signs of the Creator. In the world as it should be things fitted together and worked together; at the same time, there was a space for diversion and the carnivalesque, evident, for instance, in the grotesque figures with which medieval stonemasons adorned churches. For Chesterton, evil appeared when things did not fit, when there was a lack of balance, a suggestion of deformity. These qualities recur in the Father Brown stories, and Knight's discussion of these ingenious and popular compositions is the most in teresting part of his book. Father Brown is a detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, but is not purely rational and scientific in his investigations. He combines an acute power of observation with wisdom about human nature acquired in the confessional, and he frequently solves a mystery or clears up a crime because of his sense that something does not look right, his consciousness of odd clashes and disharmonies. Knight isdisappointing in his discussion of Chesterton's longer fiction. He follows the general opinion that TheMan Who Was Thursday ishis best novel, which Iwould dispute, making a case for The Napoleon of Notting Hill, about which Knight has little to say. TheMan Who Was Thursday is a fast-moving phantasmagoria about the problems of identity; a gang of anarchists planning towreck society are revealed one by one to be detectives in disguise. At the very end, the chief anarchist, themonstrous Sunday, who ismorally and physically larger than life, is revealed as none other than the mysterious chief detective who employed the others. Chesterton subtitled the novel 'anightmare', and it does have a dream-like inconsequence. Even the seasons are uncertain: the action is said to take place in February and at one point Lon don is blanketed in snow, but at other times the weather iswarm, trees are in full leaf, and lilac is in bloom. In this energetic but incoherent story Chesterton pursued the implications of things not looking right, of being other than they seem. At the end Sunday appears as a version of God, though Chesterton denied this interpreta tion. Knight's reading of The Man Who Was Thursday strikes me aswrong-headed. He attempts an intertextual analysis, relating it to H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Conrad's The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness. The Secret Agent is, admit tedly, about a gang of anarchists plotting in London; but beyond that the parallels and repetitions that Knight tries to uncover say nothing relevant about Chesterton's novel. Chesterton's concern with evil appears to lead back to certain bad experiences he had as a student in the i89os. Whatever they were, they must have been on 28o Reviews an infinitely smaller scale than the evil enacted in the...