Tag Archives: G. K. Chesterton

American Gods

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American GodsAmerican Gods by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Neil Gaiman’s work is a good example of the law of conservation of narrative: story is neither created nor destroyed; it is simply transformed from one form to another. Gaiman’s novel American Gods could have been a hundred different things, representing the new gods of America in a hundred different ways. But instead it’s something significant, because Gaiman knows the first rule of original story-telling: know the original stories.

This is what’s wrong with a lot of writing today: it’s shallow. Much of it seems to be written in a vacuum. But the thing about writing (and especially fantasy) is that for it to be really alive, for the story to be rich, it needs to draw on deep wells. And these wells— as American Gods illustrates— go all the way back to the beginning. Gaiman weaves a new and compelling story, a story about the new gods and the old gods in America, but he does it because he understands the building-blocks of the oldest tales.

If you’re looking for a modern story-teller archetype, Neil Gaiman is it. He accumulated a nearly inexhaustible supply of capital and credibility with the classic Sandman series of graphic novels, where he showed he had the knowledge and skill to weave with a rich and textured fabric, pulling in literary figures from Orpheus to Chesterton. To be honest though, after Sandman I found most of Gaiman’s work— Neverwhere, Stardust, the movies Coraline and Mirrormask— to be a bit disappointing (though I liked M is for Magic). Like I said though, he has inexhaustible credibility, so I when I found American Gods in paperback on my sister’s tall brick shelves, I took it home.

This is the Gaiman I remember from Sandman: raw, epic, and dark in a way that shimmers toward opalescence, like the sheen on a serpent’s back. Gaiman’s world is haunting and beautiful; it’s elegant and terrifying; it draws on the deep joy of Chesterton and the riddled wisdom of Gene Wolfe (both of whose words make appearances in this book) with a more pagan flavor. But not an anti-Christian paganism; more like a pre-Christian paganism, a paganism of the deep forests where Christ is still a rumor of Rome on the horizon.

American Gods is the story of a man named Shadow (and this is where Gaiman’s narrative credibility comes in: only he could give a protagonist in a fantasy novel such a trite name and have it stick and work). Shadow has just gotten out of prison and is traveling home, when he runs into a figure who recruits him for a coming war. It turns out that our country has become a battleground between gods of the old world (Europe, Asia, and Africa, primarily) and the new gods of America (things like Media, Internet, and other intangibles as well as gods of industry, railroad, and transportation).

If it sounds a bit transcendental, it’s not. Gaiman keeps it grounded in physicality. Apart from Shadow’s annoying tendency to have significant plot points revealed through dreams (though in fairness he’s spending a lot of time in communication with Native American deities), Gaiman’s gods are very physical: they screw, smoke, swear, throw punches, and try to assassinate each other.

Like I said, a master of old stories. Look some up. This is what the gods spent their time doing.

I can’t go into the plot much at all without dropping spoilers, because even in the very first chapter there are twists and turns. The whole book is a riddle, and there are pleasing knots throughout. The narrative follows Shadow, about whom we continue to learn more, as he works with a man named Wednesday (whose identity readers familiar with mythology will work out fairly quickly) to recruit the old gods— those brought to America by immigrants— in a coming battle against the new.

If you know your mythology, you’ll recognize figures as they’re introduced, but you certainly won’t recognize everyone. Gaiman doesn’t keep his mythology confined to a specific ethnicity. There are gods and monsters from all across the map, several of whom I didn’t know. And Gaiman isn’t one to spell everything out for you, putting nice labels on each god as it is introduced.

That said, it’s the riddles that really make this book work. When gods battle, they tend to do it out of sight of mortals, which is why Shadow— a human more or less like us— makes a good lens through which to view the story. We’re forced to figure things out along with him. And the riddles envelop this story like those Russian dolls that fit inside each other. The big riddle of the entire book is revealed at the end, and it’s flawlessly done, something you don’t expect but that you see clues for throughout once you know it. And the smaller, nested riddles— such as the mystery that Shadow stumbles upon in the middle third of the book in a small Northern town— you can amuse yourself by figuring out as you go. In this, Gaiman is definitely a student of Wolfe, though unlike his master Gaiman is more merciful in that by the end of the book he’ll show you how the trick is done.

If you know Gaiman primarily through his softer stuff, be warned: this book is raw. The language is that of a Brit who seasons liberally with profanity (effectively, to be fair). And there’s plenty of sex. And not mere mortal sex either: god-sex. If you blush easily, keep this book on the shelf.

But the book is strong, and besides an excellent tale, Gaiman is saying something here about the nature of narrative and belief itself and even something about the essence of America. It’s a story by someone who loves America with the wide open eyes of an outsider. Gaiman writes about an America that actually exists, as he explains in his introduction, about real roadside attractions and about a culture (albeit one already slightly dated) we’re sure to recognize. More than that though, he talks about what’s happening beneath the surface: what happens to gods and beliefs and stories when they find themselves in this new world.

This is where his work has the most depth, and this is where you get a glimpse of Wolfe and Chesterton peering over his shoulders (or perhaps perched on his shoulders, like the ravens of Odin). In this non-Christian (but not necessarily anti-Christian) polytheistic world, Gaiman’s sympathies are clearly with the old gods with all their arrogance and faded glory, with all their personality. They have something the new, brash, neon gods of commerce and industry lack. As Gaiman has his character Shadow say: I’d prefer the sad roadside attraction to the new gleaming hotel, because there’s something more real there.

America, it turns out, is a bad place for gods. As Gaiman spells out several times, the land isn’t fertile for them. And it’s the land itself lurking in the background of the story, a shadowy figure that’s never a player in the same sense as the (ultimately revealed) figures pulling the strings of even the gods. Gods don’t flourish here like they did in the Old World, and even the new gods arise quickly and fade fast. But this isn’t a work of comparative religion, so Gaiman never really chases this idea or offers us reasons why. And because this is a story to which the monotheistic gods aren’t invited, they’re not a part of Gaiman’s narrative.

But the book isn’t an explanation. It’s a story. The best stories explain some things, but they don’t explain everything. (This is what Biblical literalists forget about the Bible.) It’s a really, really good story about gods in America. It’s also, more significantly, a story about stories: what they do, what they’re for, how they have the power to shape cultures, and what happens to them (or might happen to them) in this brave new world in which we find ourselves.

The Man Who Was Thursday

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The Man Who Was Thursday: A NightmareThe Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday includes an explanatory note at the end of the text, taken from one of Chesterton’s columns published the day before his death, in which he calls attention to the work’s subtitle and the fact that most people ignore it. For me, that subtitle– “A Nightmare”– is one of the biggest riddles of the work. As I reread it recently for a course I’m auditing, “The Catholic Imagination in 20th-Century Fiction,” that question kept coming back to me: in what terms does Chesterton view this story as a nightmare?

It’s certainly dreamlike. The protagonist, Gabriel Syme, is an undercover policeman charged with infiltrating a secret ring of anarchists. He does so by a remarkable chain of events that results in him being elected to the Central Council of Anarchists, a body in which each member is given the codename of a day of the week (hence the title). The monstrous leader of this council and of the worldwide society of anarchists is Sunday, a figure that looms over the entire narrative like a thunderhead.

The course of the novel is one of sudden reversals and switches, a series of unmaskings that are sudden and sweeping and– eventually– somewhat ludicrous. Our hero soon realizes he is not the only person on the council who is not what he appears. The frequent and increasingly elaborate disguises are certainly dreamlike. So are the sudden changes of scenery (moving from London to the French countryside and back almost effortlessly), the weird weather (a breakfast on a balcony followed by a sudden snowstorm), and the bizarre chases.

There is also throughout the book the dreamy quality that makes all of Chesterton’s work so memorable, but it is a sharp and specific dreaminess: his characteristic attention to beauty and the mythological vistas in the everyday. Syme’s prosaic London and its various scenes (buildings along the river, rides in hansom cabs through neighborhoods, glimpses of bushes across a meadow) are glorified– even sanctified– by Chesterton as things of true terror and sublimity. Syme notes, for instance, during a duel in which he realizes he may likely die, that he is not only fighting against anarchy on behalf of all ordinary and wonderful things (a parallel here I think to how Chesterton saw himself as a philosophical champion against the anarchy of nihilism) but that he would be satisfied to lay his whole life beneath a certain almond bush glimpsed across the field, looking upward through its branches.

Though aspects of the novel have a feel of a nightmare (especially the penultimate twist that seems to have Syme and his allies alone against the world), it is the final unmasking, the revelation of the nature of Sunday himself, which takes place during the most dream-like sequence of a novel, that I still don’t see in light of the subtitle. The identity of Sunday, and what it signifies for Chesterton’s view of nature and the universe, is the central theme of the novel. In many ways, I think Syme’s experience with Sunday is an analogy of Chesterton’s conversion experience: he thought he was a man alone, defending the ordinary against the forces of anarchy, but in all his defiance he found himself continually driven back to orthodoxy, always finding the figure that he thought the greatest architect of anarchy grinning out from the cracks of reality. He kept, he has Syme say, feeling he was seeing the backside of nature– all its grimness and cruelty and beauty– but he (in the character of Syme) finally sees its face. And it’s that final realization that I have trouble understanding in the context of the tale as nightmare.

The final twist might be seen coming a long way off, and the ones leading up to it might start to feel a bit ridiculous, but the entire novel still feels fresh and exuberant, if a bit slapdash. Chesterton’s prose is easy and engaging, even when it’s dashing off on a tangent to describe clouds above the city at sunset or how the buildings across the river look like monsters. This is the point, for him. The buildings are monsters. The sunset is a flame. And this may perhaps be the most poignant part of the thing called the Catholic imagination, the thing that rings through all of Chesterton’s work– the idea that the world is almost shockingly, unbelievably good, and the greatest adventure is living among the ordinary things of creation and seeing them so.

A dream, perhaps. But I hope not a nightmare.

Manalive

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ManaliveManalive by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What does optimism look like? What would be the result of a life lived in absolute goodness and innocence? Do you have to be blind and stupid (or intolerably dull) to imagine the world is an unspeakably good place and behave accordingly? This is the paradox of reading Chesterton. These are the questions that Chesterton, in all his blustering bigness, wrestles with in every one of his writings. And we shade our eyes, and we laugh or we sigh, and we ask ourselves: was he serious? And we hope desperately that he was.

I can’t do Chesterton justice. He’s a wonderful, frustrating, bigger-than-life character who himself belongs in a fairy tale (and, fittingly enough, Neil Gaiman puts him there in The Sandman). He has inspired and exasperated generations of Catholic apologists. He was a columnist, a journalist, a writer of pseudo-fantastic tales, a Christian apologist, and author of the greatest long-form modern poem in the English language. He is C.S. Lewis with a bit more swagger. He’s hard to swallow, wonderful to read, and always painfully refreshing.

Chesterton believes that the world is good. Unflinchingly, undeniably good. You can find his apologetics in Orthodoxy, but you can find his philosophy distilled to the best effect in his novel Manalive, one of my all-time favorite books. Manalive—for reasons I still don’t understand—is not as well known as The Man Who Was Thursday or even The Napoleon of Notting Hill. But if you want Chesterton at his brightest, if you want to know what all the fuss is about, start here. It’s not all smooth going, especially if you’re not up to speed on late-Victorian literary forms (because no one outside of Masterpiece Theatre really talks like this, do they?). Much of the story is told through letters and nested flashbacks, and the characters spend most of the duration of the novel in a single room. It’s short though, and it would make a fine play.

I maintain that it’s a great book. I’ve read most (all?) of Chesterton’s novels, and I think this is the best elucidation of what he was trying to convince people of regarding the nature of reality. Perhaps not the most compelling plot, but still fun to read and (once you get used to it) laugh out loud funny.

The plot is fairly straightforward. A group of world-weary adults are living together in a boarding house in London called Beacon Hill. An old acquaintance of one of them shows up and with his madcap antics convinces them that they’re not really living and that they should spend more time climbing trees, playing games, and having picnics on the roof. The boarding house is transformed into a place where anything is possible—where its inhabitants realize that anything always was possible—and, among other things, they pair off and start planning weddings. Innocent Smith, the newcomer, is the model of Chestertonian Christianity: very much alive and very much convinced of the goodness of the world. This is Chesterton at his best: making you stand on your head to see that the world was a magical place all along.

But what’s this? Smith attacks a visitor to the boarding house in the process of planning an elopement with one of the boarders. New information comes to the surface. It turns out Smith has attempted murder before. He’s a criminal. A thief. And, apparently, a polygamist, abducting unfortunate girls all over the country. An inquest is held. The boarders, so recently enchanted by Smith’s antics, decide to investigate the matter themselves, and through a series of eye-witness accounts and flashbacks that form the second half of the novel, each of the charges against Smith—attempted murder, robbery, marital abandonment, and polygamy—are examined in turn. Is Smith a villain, or is he simply the exemplar of true goodness and innocence that seems madness in the eyes of the world?

If you know Chesterton, you know the answer. All of Chesterton’s paradoxes are trotted out and displayed in the life of Innocent Smith. Smith shoots at people, but only because he’s sure he’ll miss and to show them the value of life. He breaks into houses, but only his own, because it’s by climbing through a window or down a chimney that you can see what is yours from a new perspective. He leaves home, but only to find it again for the first time. He courts his wife again and again under different guises, because only marriage is the true, unending romantic adventure. He refuses to settle into a life of dull contentedness; he continually shocks himself into true life, into true awareness and appreciation of his world, his home, and his family, by a sort of constant cartwheeling of innocent amazement.

Does it work, we ask along with the other characters in the novel. Is it possible that being so perfectly good and perfectly innocent will result in such exuberant happiness? Well, Chesterton asks us through the lips of one of his characters, how many of us have ever tried it? Smith in this novel is Chesterton’s challenge to world-weariness and ennui, which were always for him among the greatest sins. But does it work? I can suspend disbelieve in a novel. I can, as through the wide, bright windows of Beacon House, look out for a time on Chesterton’s world of sunlight and dizzying clouds. I can try to believe the world is as good as he says it is.

But I doubt. This is my Chestertonian paradox, and I don’t know enough about Chesterton’s biography to answer it. Manalive was written before the Great War, which killed the optimism of millions of lesser men than he. (For some reason I have it in my head that Chesterton was a war correspondent during the Boer War, but I can’t find a citation that establishes that right now. If so, it would mean he had experienced some fairly gruesome things firsthand.) Did it kill his? Probably not, but what about a kid dying of cancer? What about all the rotten, shitty realities of the world that make Chesterton’s radical optimism seem ludicrously naïve?

I love Chesterton. I think he’s right. I hope he’s right, and maybe that’s what it comes down to: hope and choice, choosing to believe the world is better at the core than we can sometimes perceive or conceive. And if you can take that from a dead, sometime overtly racist, Catholic white guy, read this book.

Our books become the windows through which we see our world. You might find Borges and Wolfe (who modeled my favorite character in literature, Patera Silk, after Chesterton’s famous priest-detective Father Brown) sitting on the sill of Chesterton’s stories. And the view through these windows is indeed bright. That’s certainly worth something, since so many of ours have become broken or are looking out onto grisly, post-apocalyptic scenes. Read Chesterton to try to believe the world is that good, and then go out into it to see for yourself. I can’t promise he’s right, but I hope to God he is.