The first time I picked up this book, I was working in a library. I flipped it open and found this conversation:". . . But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment - you've got used to your drinks and things - I shan't be pretty much longer-""Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael. "And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides ... Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed. I, for one, don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute - a tower with all the trumpets shouting.""You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerety in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?""My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman. "What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you?"I was drawn in, and convinced my soon-to-be-husband to read the rest of the book aloud to me for a birthday present. That was, oh, eight or nine years ago? We finally got our own copy last year, and it's been sitting on my TBR shelf ever since - but no more!I gobbled this up yesterday. Reading Chesterton is always a wild ride, and you're never sure which way is up when you're done. This novel's hero, Innocent Smith, might come the closest to being an incarnation of Chesterton's general philosophy of life of any of his characters - maybe even more than Fr. Brown.The book starts in a London boarding house the day a wind kicks up, and with that wind comes a man named Innocent Brown, who first energizes everyone, then appears to do something criminally insane. The criminality is investigated, and it turns out that rather than being mad, Innocent Brown is in fact the sanest man that ever lived. He breaks into his own house because he wishes to learn how to covet his own goods. He threatens suicide-fancying men with death so that they can see that they really prefer life. He pretends to meet his own wife for the first time over and over so that he can see her as he knows she ought to be seen. And, as one character says, he did it all "in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other people's."I like this passage, where Smith is arguing with a Russian man about Ibsen:""The Doll's House"?" he cried vehemently; "why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house. Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while all the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house, and shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open inwards ". . . I have found out how to make a big thing small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll's house. Get a long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his great gift of distance."This book is a romp, and the great giant Innocent Brown jumps and jolts and thunders all through it like a baby elephant. The best part is reading the dialogue that occurs around him, as onlookers try to figure him out. Michael, the man from the first dialogue I quoted, finally comes to the conclusion that Innocent "has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments." He says that it is this complete goodness that makes Innocent so happy.Michael's friend, Gould, then disagrees with him, saying gravely, "I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry," to which Michael replies, quietly, "Well, will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?"Loved this book, and love it still.
I finished this book in the midst of a wikkid bad pissy spell, so I think my overall impressions of this book were somewhat mottled by my erstwhile emotional shenaniganzerie.The story is brilliantly arcane, but I honestly wish I had stopped reading about 10 pages short of the end. Maybe it was the mood I was in, but the tidy resolution of the inconceivable complexities presented in the beginning and middle of the book let me down a little bit. In the end (don't worry, I won't spoil it), I had hoped for a different resolution to the inquisition...something more Hollywoody and fantastical...but I suppose that was Chesterton's desire all along...to remind us that Hollywood is ultimately fake and our own seeming banality is the most fantastical thing we can ever aspire to recapture.The book is a definite "must-read", if for nothing else than the fact that others have been so greatly influenced by its message. The recommendation of the book came from a trusted friend, at my revelation to her that the year 2010 was to be "a year of release" in my life. While I can greatly appreciate the spirit in which the recommendation was made, I fear I'm still fiercely gripping my mythical curtainrod, and remain completely unconvinced that the ground is a mere 6 inches from the soles of my feet. Perhaps upon revisiting this book (perhaps soon) under a different light, I will respond in a manner more befitting my usual inspiration-hungry self.I suspect the revelation of the fantastical within the banal was the whole point of the exercise, in Chesterton's mind. There was a "pulling it off" achieved by I. Smith that I couldn't fathom to aspire to in my own life. The origins of his mental meanderings resonated with me quite deeply, but when putting myself into anything approaching a similar situation of being on the receiving end of I. Smith's assaults, I fear I'd respond more like Warner than the Warden. thank you, Chesterton, for an allegory not to be soon forgotten. Oh to climb trees with abandon and have the courage to set out and rediscover my own green lamp-post...
What do You think about Manalive (2000)?
Absolutely brilliant. MANALIVE manages to be touching, heartfelt, and incredibly life-affirming without resorting--not even for an instant--to saccharinity or melodrama. Of all Chesterton's works, this book perhaps best encapsulates his personal outlook on life, and the amount of wit required for writing a novel like this is mind-boggling. MANALIVE is utterly jam-packed with the sort of delicious paradoxes and unconventionally conventional wisdom I've come to expect from Chesterton, but this is the first time that the brilliance of his writing has actually given me the chills... The closest comparison I can make is that this book feels like a cross between Charles Dickens (flawless characterizations and prose) and Lewis Carroll (inspired lunacy that is so reasonable-sounding, you begin to think YOU are the one who's crazy). It's a crying shame this book has been mostly forgotten. Without a doubt, Innocent Smith is one of the most endearing characters I've encountered in all of literature. Furthermore, I consider it one of Hollywood's biggest failures that a movie adaptation starring Robin Williams was never produced. (And *gasp* probably not even considered!) My only criticism is that, on one or two occassions, Chesterton employs such racially-charged language as is anathema in our modern PC society. Which isn't to say he was racist--simply a product of his time.
—John
Summary“The glory of God is man fully alive” –St. IrenaeusThis seems to be the thesis Chesterton is playing with as he introduces us to Innocent Smith, a man alive. Innocent takes great lengths to break out from the seduction of routine to forget what it means to be alive. From traveling around the world to greater appreciate his family; to dispensing life from the barrel of a revolver, he finds ways to remind himself and others that they are alive and that life is beautiful. Contrasted with mod
—Chris
G. K. Chesterton was a man who discovered the secret to a happy life—I doubt one can read much of his work without coming to that conclusion. The most natural reaction to his body of work, I think, is amazement: to wonder what secret this man discovered that allowed him to take so much delight in a sheet of brown paper, for example, or where he found the energy to defend his faith in a land growing faithless with so much gusto and wit.In Manalive, a short novel full of events as improbable as the name of the story's protagonist, Chesterton shares his happy secret with the rest of the world—a world that has grown old and weary because it has grown melancholy.The novel starts with a gust of strong wind blowing across England, a wind that extinguishes candlelight and plunges a young boy in darkness, and startles a young mother as the clothes she set out to dry dance on the clothesline. But though it shocks everyone it touches, Chesterton tells us not to fear: this is a "good wind that blows nobody harm."The good wind blows into Beacon House, a boarding house where five people live (inmates, Chesterton calls them, and tells us that although they are young inmates, they are also listless). The wind startles the inmates of Beacon House as it has startled the inhabitants of England; it blows a hat over the fence and into their garden, followed by an umbrella and then a bag, and finally by the owner of these wind-strewn possessions, a man whose name is probably Innocent Smith.Smith moves into the boarding house and his presence there is like a bolt of energy that revitalizes the inmates (the day after he moves in, we're told, "there was a crazy sense that it was everybody's birthday.") This happy feeling doesn't last long, though. In a wild and crazy act, Smith asks one of the visitors to Beacon House to marry him; and in another, roaring with laughter, he fires his gun at the doctor called to investigate the mental health of a man who proposes to a woman he met only a few hours before. During the investigation of Smith, it turns out he might not be so innocent after all—criminal at best, in fact, and more than likely a maniac and a monster who has left "a track of blood and tears across the world." As usual with Chesterton, though, things are almost never what they seem at first (or second, or third) glance.Chesterton isn't always an easy read, especially in his fiction. He's so playful with his language, so light-hearted with his characters and their conversations (and sometimes with plot itself), that an impatient reader might feel compelled to yell, "Get to the point!" But the playfulness is the point. Why do men marry their wives only once? Why do criminals break into other people's homes but no one thinks to break into his or her own house? Why covet your neighbour's possessions, when it's better in every way to covet your own?If the answers to those questions aren't obvious—or, much worse, if the questions themselves seem silly—Manalive will help us see the world from Chesterton's point of view. That is, we'll see it hanging upside down from the chimney of the world, having broken in through the roof, and if we're lucky we'll be able to say, "You know—I think I'd be happy if I could live here for a while."(This review first posted as a special recommendation of Manalive on my personal website).
—Karl El-Koura
