G. K. Chesterton Again

ELT 47 : 2 2004 G. K. Chesterton Again John D. Coates. G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. ν + 200 pp. $109.95 IN THE PREFACE to this book Joseph Schwartz writes: "Among the few really fine books written about G K Chesterton none is finer than John Coates' Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (1984). My very high opinion of this work led me to have great expectations for his new one." While I share the assessment of Coates's previous book on Chesterton, my expectations of this latest volume were more circumspect than Schwartz's. Writing a second book on a given author is always difficult, particularly when the subject matter is relatively similar . The problem is exacerbated in this case by the fact that Coates has published a series of articles on Chesterton since the appearance of his last full-length work in 1984. The acknowledgements section to G. K. Chesterton as Controversialist, Essayist, Novelist, and Critic reveals that the book's five main chapters largely comprise material covered in five articles published between 1989 and 1998. Despite the lack of new material, this book does bring together some of the extremely insightful work on Chesterton that Coates has undertaken. Coates's desire to read Chesterton within his cultural context is evident from the very first chapter, where Chesterton's engagement with the epistemological challenges raised by the early stages of modernism is considered thoughtfully. Following the broad sweeps offered in chapter one, chapter two offers a closer exploration of the political context in which Chesterton wrote and examines his contributions to the Speaker. Observing the changes brought about by the new editorial board that was established when the periodical changed hands in 1899, Coates tells us that "[t]he role and character of The Speaker under J L Hammond cannot be understood apart from the political and ideological conflicts immediately before and during the Boer War. These conflicts were the matrix from which Chesterton's style, public persona and many of the fundamentals of his intellectual position were developed." Reading Chesterton's writing for the Speaker alongside the development of British liberalism at the turn of the century is timely, and helps to explain some of the political and economic ideas (especially Distributism) pursued by Chesterton throughout his career. 210 Book reviews In the third chapter Coates examines Chesterton as a novelist. This is probably the strongest section of the book and contains much penetrating criticism. Rather than seizing on the polemics within Chesterton's novels as an opportunity to write off the work's artistic integrity, Coates encourages us to recognise Chesterton as an Edwardian novelist of ideas. In an effort to develop this line of thought, Coates offers a close reading of Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross. Noting the way in which the novel "is part of a continuing debate with H G Wells which began with The Food of the Gods and Heretics if not before," Coates invites us "to consider the way in which its rhetorical strategies, narrative devices and imagery stand in dialogic relation to its readers [sic] expectations and to the narrative techniques, imagery, and devices of other writers within the same genre." Many of the insights contained within this chapter are astute and the sustained analysis of The Ball and the Cross constitutes one of the most successful readings of this novel to date. Chapter four is less interesting. The attempt to revive critical interest in Chesterton's use of the essay form is commendable, but it is difficult to see why, given the rationale of the earlier chapter on the Speaker, Coates chooses to examine a number of pieces reprinted in Tremendous Trifles rather than discussing these essays in the context of their initial publication. Although Coates makes reference to the fact that these essays first appeared in the Daily News and comments briefly on the newspaper's readership, his subsequent discussion largely abstracts Chesterton's work from the newspapers they were written for in order to make general claims about Chesterton's use of the essay form. Unfortunately, this approach results in a lack of specificity that renders the...