Preface:
It must be disclosed that I don’t really find G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories all that great. (Why is it that I so frequently write about things, people, and situations I truly dislike? I wonder what a trained psychiatrist would say about it?) As far as the mystery writing goes, I find them… unnatural, too artificially constructed, almost illogical… For everyone, of course, but the author and his deducing reverend. But naturally, they don’t count, because they are cheats, holding all the cards and the red herrings up their sleeves.
Moreover, I consider G.K. Chesterton a racist, which makes him absolutely unacceptable to me as an individual. Some of his descriptions and the choices of words simply appalled me back when I read him.
(If you feel tempted to verify yourselves that my accusations can actually be substantiated, read God of Gongs. That’s why I’m sharing the link to The Complete Father Brown Stories below. [And no, I’m not an Amazon Associate – it’s purely for your convenience.])
It is hard for me to imagine that any truly unprejudiced and open-minded thinker would be using such language, regardless of his/her native historical period and commonly accepted jargon of the correspondent time. And no, he is not just putting those offensive words into his characters’ mouths for the sake of the conversational authenticity. He uses them as his own narrative descriptives. It’s despicable and utterly inexcusable as far as I’m concerned.
But! One can find a grain of wisdom even in a truckload of manure. And this one goes straight to the heart of the main conflict suffered daily specifically by the American workers in employment of the entrepreneurial business owners – the same antagonism that cemented the foundation of my own madness (“I Built This Prison”):
“[He] made himself big by his own considerable abilities: and there’s no doubt that many of those on whom he has shown his abilities would like to show theirs on him with a shotgun. [He] might easily get dropped by some man he’d never even heard of; some labourer he’d locked out, or the clerk in a business he’d busted… In this country the relations of employers and employed are considerably strained.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, The Mistake of the Machine
The Frustrated CFO 