If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are—both of them, I mean.
Reading G.K. Chesterton is (at least for me), most of the time an intellectual romp. Though I frequently agree with many of the author’s points, I certainly never agree with all of them. But I enjoy the caperings of his mind, as one enjoys watching an acrobat. Chesterton looks at the world every which-way, often from upside down. He had the body of a sedentary beast, but an acrobatic imagination.
What’s Wrong With the World is different from most of his books because (as he declares) he leaves religion mostly out of it, except in reference to other things. Though I’m a damned heretic in his view, I find that I like his religious writing better than his political writing. He was devoted to a political movement called Distributism, a sort of a mild socialism. It retained private property, but wanted to parcel that property out more fairly, so that every free man would have a piece of land of his own, holding the dignity of a property owner. The aristocracy would be eliminated as a vestigial organ (gently, if I understand it correctly). Chesterton regards everything around him in comparison with an imagined medieval Catholic world, populated by free, contented peasants.
What’s Wrong With the World is a systematic explanation of why he considers the present system of capitalism and moneyed oligarchy unjust. Along the way, he exercises his trademark imagination, peppering his pages with paradox.
For the modern reader, though, it makes for some hard going. I think I understood many of Chesterton’s references (to prime ministers, poets, and current political controversies) better than the average American reader, but a lot of it was still opaque to me.
If you’re a Chesterton fan, you’ll probably want to read What’s Wrong With the World for the sake of completeness. If you’re new to GKC, I’d recommend starting with some other book.
Thanks for this! I’ve been enjoyingly nibbling away at Chesterton books for years, but do not remember if I’ve read this, though I remember the title!
Fans of late-Nineteenth-/early-Twentieth-century detective stories (not least, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes), might enjoy trying Chesterton’s Father Brown stories with their humble, common-sensical, sharp-witted, unlikely-looking detective-priest. (Oops! – I did not stop to word-search to see if you had reviewed any!) We’ve lately been enjoying Simon Stanhope’s audiobook versions of several of these on YouTube. And I think Charles Williams’s Archdeacon Julian Davenant in his novel, War in Heaven, is partly playing with imagining a sort of Anglican analogue of Father Brown.
A very wild Chesterton novel I enjoy a lot is The Ball and the Cross.
I’ve never reviewed the Father Brown stories here, though I’ve read them all. I don’t love them the way many do, as I find the plots rather contrived — even when I agree with the lesson the author is trying to demonstrate. But they are certainly amusing reading.