Roger Brunyate's Reviews > Father Brown Stories, 11 Tales

Far From Parochial

I must have read some of the Father Brown stories in my youth, but now know of the character mainly through the British television series starring Mark Williams. Despite the actor's skill in capturing something of the essence of Chesterton's modest yet perceptive priest, the programs annoyed me by setting him in the middle of a vapid situation comedy and, worse, making him the parish priest of an English village (complete with Lady of the Manor), as though there had never been a Reformation, and English society was still Catholic. Coming upon this Penguin anthology, I wanted to see what Chesterton himself did when he began the series in 1910. Reading the originals reveals the adaptation as sheer travesty.

In none of the eleven stories collected here do we see Father Brown as a parish priest, even in his own community. He is presented as a reticent figure who crops up in incongruous situations, often without anybody quite knowing why he is there. And it is striking how varied these settings are. Yes, one of them—the famous "Hammer of God"—is the parish church of an English village, but the vicar is the brother of the licentious squire, and very much an Anglican. Other settings include a boat train, a walled garden, an exclusive hotel, a Scottish moor, and a haunted castle in Cornwall. I had not realized how much Chesterton owes to Edgar Allan Poe in the Gothic ambience of his stories; his verbal mastery of the style, as in this opening paragraph from "The Honour of Israel Gow," is superb:

A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scottish châteaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens. This note of a dreamy, almost a sleepy devilry, was no mere fancy from the landscape. For there did rest on the place one of those clouds of pride and madness and mysterious sorrow which lie more heavily on the noble houses of Scotland than on any other of the children of men. For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.

What do I like most about Father Brown? His ability to emerge from the shadows with the one modest observation that will reveal the case in a new light. The fact that these observations are based as much on his knowledge of mankind from the confessional as on more physical clues. And his spiritual insight, which sees questions of guilt and innocence in theological rather than legal terms, occasionally more terrible than the written law, but generally with a touching gentleness of understanding.

These characteristics make him the opposite of a Sherlock Holmes, who strides in and takes charge. Father Brown is rarely the leading sleuth in a case, but rather the bystander who offers suggestions from the sidelines. As a result, he is seldom the hero of his own stories, and often most of the narration is carried by others. In the first half-dozen stories here, the balance is nonetheless right. But the last few rather disappointed me. For at the same time as Chesterton is moving to ever more fantastic settings—brigands in the Italian mountains, warring factions in Brazil, convicts in a Chicago prison—he also tends to sideline his title character more and more. A pity. Perhaps we need a little more of that English parish after all?