The Wisdom of Father Brown

Rating:
Summary: The power of quiet observation
Review: A crime has occurred, often (though not always) a murder. As authorities and observers attempt to solve the mystery, often arriving at a false solution, meekly in the background is a humble, unassuming priest. Using his knowledge of the criminal mind, and often bringing to bear theology (because unsound theology is the basis of moral failure), the unnoticed priest arrives at the solution. Each time one comes to the end of these short mysteries, the reader realizes that there is some small detail that he or she missed, which was not missed by Father Brown. Thus is displayed the power of quiet observation. These short stories make for some good bedtime reading, and even profound theological reflection. The only reason I gave this volume four stars instead of five is that mystery is not personally my favorite genre. Even non-mystery lovers can enjoy these stories much as I have.

Rating:
Summary: Superior mystery fare
Review: G.K. Chesterton is a humorous writer, and he writes sterling prose; these two enviable qualities distinguish him as superior to Arthur Conan Doyle as a mystery writer, not to mention superior to most writers in any genre. This Penguin omnibus of nearly fifty stories featuring his clerical sleuth Father Brown is an excellent introduction to the man's classic English style of understated wit, taste for the exotic and the mythical, unbounded imagination, and worldly philosophy, helpfully reduced to easily digestible epigrams by the discursive priest. Chesterton doesn't cloister his protagonist in a strictly ecclesiastical environment; Father Brown's social realm lies far outside the church and well within the material world of theatrically colorful disguises, melodramatic villains and their not entirely innocent victims, big business, and fabulous wealth.

If Chesterton has anything in common with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it is the way he incorporates his strong religious convictions into his fiction. Two of the Commandments--the ones forbidding stealing and killing--are the most typically transgressed in these stories, the committers of these sins betrayed by moral weakness detected by Father Brown, a scholar of motives and the human tendency to do wrong in the absence of a solid spiritual anchor. Like Sherlock Holmes, he solves crimes by noticing small details that everybody else misses and applying the most rigid logic, but he is more human and animated than the stolid Holmes. He even has a professional cohort, a French private detective who goes by the name of Flambeau and who bedeviled the world as a master thief before the solicitous Father Brown showed him the error of his wicked ways.

Aside from his short, stout stature, mildly clumsy behavior, and the benevolent patience with which he tolerates atheists, socialists, skeptics, mystics, pagans, etc., Father Brown's greatest distinction as a character is his representation of the supreme logic and rationale Chesterton considers inherent in Roman Catholic theology; he is less a visual figure than an embodiment of a set of ideas, a projection of his author's conscience and intellect, clothed in black. Although Chesterton undoubtedly hopes to enlighten the heathens among his readers, he doesn't insult their intelligence with simplistic morality tales; he knows that we don't need Father Brown to remind us, however eloquently, that stealing and killing are wrong. Chesterton rather uses the conflict between good and evil as the context within which he can expound his philosophical opinions through a priestly voice.





Rating:
Summary: Read Chesterton!
Review: I wish to comment on George Orwell's denunciation of Chesterton, quoted by one of the other reviewers. I think this comment is unfortunate coming as it does from a writer who was supposedly a champion of freedom and democracy. Orwell regrettably confuses sincere expounding of religious faith with political propaganda! Then he implies that being a Catholic is incompatible with being a man of intellect! I suppose that to Orwell the Catholic Church was just another big, bad totalitarian organization like Communist Russia. Fortunately, the Church's "propagandists" like Chesterton use the weapons of reason and logic to win people over. While he denounced dictatorships in his writings, Orwell appears to have turned into a little dictator himself with this little quote. Read Chesterton, including his wonderful detective stories! In becoming a spokesman for the Catholic Church, he did not suppress his intellect, but on the contrary used it to the fullest.

Rating:
Summary: The theological equal of Sherlock Holmes.
Review: In the genre of the finely crafted English detective story, Chesterton's "Father Brown" stories are wholesome and stimulating detective tales surpassed by few others, except perhaps Doyle's legendary Sherlock Holmes. In contrast to the arrogant Holmes, however, Chesterton's protagonist is rather quiet, unassuming and modest, and makes an unlikely hero - a catholic priest. Father Brown's simple manner makes you quick to underestimate him, but the startling flashes of brilliance that spill from beneath his humble exterior soon make you realize that he has a firm grasp on the truth of a situation when you are as yet frustratingly distant from it. His perceptive one-liners make it evident that he has a clear insight into something that you see only as an apparently insoluble paradox.

Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox", and the Father Brown stories are a clear testimony of his fondness for paradox. Ultimately it is not just crimes that Brown must solve, but the paradox underlying them. In fact, not all stories are crime stories - among them are mysterious situations that do not involve criminals, and it is the perceptive insight of Father Brown that is needed make apparent contradictions comprehensible by his ruthless logic. Father Brown is not so much concerned with preserving life or bringing a criminal to justice as he is with unravelling the strands of an impossible paradox. In fact, Chesterton's conception of Father Brown is itself a paradox - both a cleric and a crime-fighter, a priest and a policeman, a representative of God's mercy and an instrument of God's justice, a proclaimer of forgiveness and a seeker of guilt, a listener in the confessional and a questioner in the interrogation.

How a priest could possibly play the role of a detective is explained in the first story, "The Blue Cross". Brown apprehends the confounded criminal Flambeau and explains that his knowledge of the criminal mind is due in part to what he's heard at the confessional booth "We can't help being priests. People come and tell us these things." When Flambeau retorts "How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" Chesterton allows his humble priest to attribute his insight into human depravity to his experience as a priest: "Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose, he said. Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil."

But both Chesterton and Father Brown have insight into much more than just human depravity - they are both champions of Catholic orthodoxy. This gives the Father Brown stories a depth not found in Brown's compatriot Holmes. In the course of Chesterton's stories, we are treated to philosophical discussions about catholic theology, such as the relationship between faith and reason. We do not merely meet an assortment of cobblers, blacksmiths, magistrates and generals, but atheists, legalists, secularists, pagans, Presbyterians, Puritans, Protestants and Catholics, all with varying and vying affections for superstition, naturalism, rationalism, scepticism, agnosticism, materialism, anarchism, nihilism, or cynicism. Along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton was one of the few writers in the twentieth century that made an important contribution to English literature that was stamped by Christian principles instead of the prevailing secularism of the day.

Readers who do not share Chesterton's theological convictions will not concur with all his insights, but they must concede that they are enjoyable, profound and stimulating. Somewhat surprising is the occasional use of blasphemous expletives such as "O my God", although generally from the mouths of others than Father Brown himself. And Brown does seem to degenerate more and more into a mouthpiece for Chesterton, with a sermonizing tone not present in the first stories.

But on the whole these are exemplary models of the English crime short story. The Penguin edition contains all the stories from all five of Chesterton's published Father Brown collections. Among my favorites are "The Blue Cross", where Father Brown follows a mysterious trail of clues and engages in some bizarre behaviour and fascinating theological discourse to apprehend Flambeau. "The Hammer of God" is also an outstanding whodunnit, as Brown solves the murder of a man who has been crushed by a huge hammer outside a church, seemingly the recipient of a divine thunderbolt of judgment from heaven. In the process Chesterton shares some thought-provoking insights, such as the memorable: "Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." Also unforgettable is "The Blast of the Book", which recounts the mysterious disappearance of five men whose only crime was to open a seemingly magical book. Father Brown is quick to unravel the paradox by explaining it as the work of an ingenious prankster.

Father Brown's tongue never fails to produce profound paradoxical gems such as "The point of the pin was that it was pointless." And: "I never should have thought he would be so illogical as to die in order to avoid death." It is Brown's unique perspective that allows him to see what others do not see. When his compatriots are awed at the eloquence of a magistrate's thundering sermon in "the Mirror of the Magistrate", Father Brown remarks: "I think the thing that struck me most was how different men look in their wigs. You talk about the prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I happened to see him take his wig off for a minute, and he really looks quite a different man. He's quite bald, for one thing."

With the finely crafted prose, depth of theological insight, and brilliant combination of perception and paradox, Chesterton has created in Father Brown a noble and enduring character, a worthy successor to Sherlock Holmes and in some respects his equal and superior. The Father Brown stories are unquestionably worthy of their designation as classics.

Rating:
Summary: A treasure trove!
Review: Other authors may have excelled in the detective story, but it was G.K. Chesterton who elevated it to a higher intellectual and literary level. His writing combines wit, humor and whimsy with deep insights into psychology, philosophy, and even theology. While others viewed the detective story as a mere entertaining puzzle, G.K. treated it as a serious art form, with potential for symbolism and allegory. Father Brown is one of the classic fictional detectives of all time, a character more "real" than many living people. How wonderful to have all the Father Brown stories under one cover! Keep this volume by your bedside or near your favorite armchair, so you can dip into it on a rainy weekend, before you go to bed, or at any time you like. All confirmed Father Brown devotees must have the Penguin COMPLETE FATHER BROWN, and those who have not yet discovered this detective genius could find no better way to become acquainted with him.

Rating:
Summary: Eminently readable and witty...
Review: This book compiles some short detective stories, with an unlikely protagonist, a priest. Father Brown is a rather quiet main character, unpretentious but remarkably assured. He uses logic in order to solve his cases, and he makes abundant use of good judgment and sound sense. Father Brown has an unique "worldly shrewdness", that probably stems from the fact that he spends many hours each day listening to the sins of other people. As a result, he is more or less acquainted with the bad side of human beings.

Father Brown is considered by many "the second most famous mystery-solver in English literature", the first being Sherlock Holmes. To tell the truth, I prefer Father Brown to Sherlock Holmes: he might not be as showy as Conan Doyle's character, but he is far more likeable, and his stories seem more likely to be real. Moreover, Chesterton's Father Brown doesn't just chase criminals, he allows the reader to learn about some interesting themes that were important when these stories were first published, but that also are important now, for example the relationship between faith and reason. He manages to that because he doesn't merely want to "catch the criminal", he also endeavors to understand human nature, and the reasons why a criminal becomes one.

The author of these mystery stories was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), a renowned English writer who wrote them between 1911 and 1936. His stories are as popular now as they were then, mainly to to the fact that Chesterton's style is compelling and refreshing, eminently readable and witty. Thus, these stories appeal not only to those who want to read a good book written in an exceptionally good english, but also to those who want to do exactly that without having to exhert themselves.

On the whole, I think this collection of short stories is worth buying and reading, not only once but many times. I highly enjoyed it, and I strongly recommend it to you :)

Belen Alcat