Four Faultless Felons

Rating:
Summary: 2.5 Stars: Cheeky progressivism, with a dash of xenophobia
Review: Just as Priestley made the case for a code of ethics by presenting people who had none of their own, so Chesterson makes his by creating a set of principled outlaws, distancing themselves from society even as they serve its cause:

A fellow who attempts murder turns out to have purposefully failed in hopes of preventing the actual murder from taking place, a dishonest doctor turns out to have relinquished his integrity in order to save his lover's father from arrest, etc. These four stories' individual weaknesses are made less visible by their structural similarities--anything Chesterson fails to fully realize in one tale, he repeats successfully in another. And while the plots are a tad too precious for even the modern Oprah reader, they inspire nonetheless.

It's just a shame that Chesterson's heartening social commentary almost always sits beside a dismaying sense of xenophobia. His idea was to present literary diversions with progressive social and political underpinnings, and it's not well-served by his curiously pronounced racism and anti-Semitism.

Three steps forward, two steps back.