G.K. Chesterton, as I have already noted, could write some odd stories. In that, he is far from exceptional. What makes Chesterton so intriguing is his mastery in writing those odd stories, that he could take a premise as outrageous as ‘the city boroughs of London establish fierce feudal rivalry in the year 1984’ and produce a novel at once comic and thought-provoking, at once philosophical and intensely human. Yet such he did in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Admittedly, that’s not my favorite of Chesterton’s works, though it was the first one I read. No, my favorite is the uproariously funny, tragically prescient novel called The Flying Inn, detailing a scenario in which Britain’s politicians use Islamic invasion to aid their destruction of the British way of life.

So, welcome to what (I hope) will become a new series! Today, we’ll take a look at Chapter 17 of The Flying Inn, titled, ‘The Poet in Parliament.’ I won’t be going into depth on the plot for the plot’s sake or reviewing the book it comes from, except to urge everybody to read it. Instead, I’ll be taking a gander at various points where Chesterton does something I find impressive as a writer.

#1 – The Little Things of Character

Big gestures, big moments, and big twists, of these are reputations made. Yet these do not always speak the loudest, nor should they speak alone. When everything is on the line, then is a man’s mettle seen, but his character comes to the front too when he has nothing to lose, nothing to gain, when he makes particular choices regardless. Character is seen not just in moments of grandeur or sheer villainy but in small things- aesthetic choices, giving instructions for a minor task, and the like. The character of Lord Ivywood (the antagonist) and how Chesterton displays it is our instructor here.

Two particular points stand out to me in this chapter, barring those delayed for other sections. First we have the description of Ivywood’s aesthetic taste, as found in the room he has renovated for the purpose (as per an earlier chapter) of being a seraglio (itself a call-back to a point of inhumanity in Chapter 2). In the opening paragraph of the chapter, Chesterton lays out this room’s new decoration (which has, as per it blocking out the entrance of the dog, Quoodle, already symbolically rejected the wholesome and the English). It is, “a call of exquisite Eastern workmanship. All through the patterns Lord Ivywood had preserved and repeated the principle that no animal shape must appear. But, like all lucid dogmatists, he perceived all the liberties his dogma allowed him. And he had irradiated this remote end of [the mansion] with sun and moon and solar and starry systems….”

Before I bring out the point I see here, let me offer also its companion. Later in the chapter, Ivywood purposes to travel to London. Having been shot in the leg several chapters earlier, he needs a crutch to make the journey, medically all-advised, at all practical. How does he request this necessity? Does he simply ask for a crutch? No; Ivywood is precise. He instructs that the gardener be asked, “to cut a pole about four feet nine inches, and put a cross-piece for a crutch.”

These two elements together testify, to the not-quite-conscious understanding of the reader, of a quality of Ivywood’s mind: his mathematical rather than aesthetic precision. He is a man of principles, and those principles he sees with sharp definition, clear-edged. Beauty he understands, perhaps, but not as a thing of life; no, it is geometry and allowance. When he accepts a dogma denying the portrait of any animal, he does not discern that to the human heart the sun and the moon are oft creatures too, and insofar as he sees this, he does not care. They are not animals in the literal sense, and so the depiction is permitted, just as two plus two equals four. He has pulled life away from logic, leaving himself with a barren mathematic.¹

#2 – The Little Things of Development

Ivywood’s character takes a particular and crucial turn in this chapter. The character of this turn can be seen in two little choices of his, the first a hint to potential, the second a decision to death. Ivywood has at this point, as already noted, been shot in the leg. He is, moreover, discouraged from using said leg for the next three weeks. Nevertheless, when his great cause, the destruction of the inns of England, is threatened, then Ivywood rises, then Ivywood issues forth, then Ivywood stands still, lame leg and all. It is now that we, with Lady Joan, see in Ivywood, “something worthy of his ancient roots, worthy of such hills and sea.” In this moment, Ivywood is really a man among men, a crusader who suffers that the right, as he sees it may triumph. Though his cause is wrong, his mettle at least is true, we think, and we admire him for it. This is a Man.

So Chesterton declares Ivywood’s potential for greatness, the best light in which he can be placed, the brightest light of the Imago Dei within Ivywood, the hard virtue which makes him admirable. So the reader is made to admire Ivywood, if just for a moment, to see that beneath the horrors of his belief, he has some true virtue still. This preparation it is which makes the finale of the chapter so poignant. Let us lay out Ivywood’s temptation.

“Lord Ivywood was observing him with a deathly quietude; another idea had come into his fertile mind. He knew his cousin, though excited, was… quite capable of making a speech…. He knew that any speech, good or bad, would wreck his whole plan…. But the orator [his cousin] had resumed his seat and drained his glass, passing a hand across his brow. And he remembered that a man who keeps a vigil in a wood all night… is liable to an accident that is not drunkenness, but something much healthier.”

Ivywood stands now on the precipice of his masterstroke, and he sits too with the man who can bring its potency to naught. This man, in the following paragraph, lays a trust in Ivywood: to call him, when the time for action comes, that they may strive as men. Dorian, the cousin in question, feels certain that though he is an avowed opponent of Ivywood, nevertheless they will clash as men before the world. Ivywood assents; he says that he will call. Then, when the time comes and Dorian slumbers in his place, Ivywood rises, stands “for a moment looking at the sleeping man,” and leaves. He feels the weight of his own treachery, for it is the “only speech he had ever delivered without any trace of eloquence,” but it is done. In Chesterton’s words, “from that hour forth he was the naked fanatic; and could feed on nothing but the future.”

So in the first moment we have seen the great potential of Ivywood, a true nobility in his soul. In the second, now, we see Ivywood abandon this potential. He abandons all save the barren necessity he has espoused by breaking his freely given word, and he becomes in an instant an evil man, consumed by his ideology, where before he was merely a man given to evil. In this little thing, as was foreshadowed by his cold betrayal of Ithaca’s innocents in Chapter 2, he turns his back on nobility and is consumed by a cause which knows not man. Thus the reader understands him; thus the reader (meaning I) knows him intensely; thus the reader learns to both pity and hate him.

Thus beauty is destroyed for the sake of barrenness.

#3 – Developing a Plan

One more point will suffice for today’s survey, and here we will depart from the theme of the first two, turn to a separate part of writing: the art of narrating a plan, its genesis particularly (for this plan’s conclusion plays out over future chapters, even to the end of the book). In this chapter, Ivywood originates a cunning plan to bring his opponent’s reign of terror to an end (read: beat the protagonists). This plan could be relayed quite quickly- ‘change the law so that their actions are subtly outside its remit’ or ‘close the loophole in the law’. Of course, that would not only be boring but lacking in character, in tension, in effect on the reader. So Chesterton takes a different route.

Chesterton lays out the fundaments of the situation as Ivywood sees them- including the urgency of the moment, the calculations of possibility, and even the original plan of the law. In each realm, Ivywood proves his skill and understanding. The failure of the law’s original plan, if incomplete success can be termed failure, is even set in its context: it did not account for a completely unconventional course of action or the publicity such action produced, stymying its attempt to stifle the English inns in silence. The conditions for changing the law too are set in place- the timing of Parliament, Ivywood’s influence over his own law, the laxity of Parliament’s care for the matter (Chesterton gives a very unflattering impression of Parliament, in this chapter, and I cannot but appreciate it).

In the course of this consideration, the reader has been given the puzzle pieces. He has been nudged forward, moreover, to use them. An inkling of the plan, perhaps, is appearing in his thoughts. So when Chesterton lays out the crucial bit of the plan, the precise modification, it comes at once as a lightning bolt, clarifying the whole affair, and as a natural end, necessary from what has come before. This checkmate being stated, Chesterton does not linger. He does not unnecessarily lay out how the checkmate functions; like in chess, the king need not be taken for the outcome to be understood. He has laid out the circumstances and the rules. The reader can see the result. He can see the coming defeat of the protagonists, the coming triumph of Lord’s Ivywood’s crusade against England.

This leads us to the crucial part of any plan, in a story. As authors, we have four practical ways to deal with plans the characters make. First, we can omit the explanation and let them succeed; second we can omit the explanation and introduce complications, possibly even failure. Third, we can explain, then gloss over the execution, almost skipping straight to the victory. Fourth, though, and this is necessary if the plan is to be explained and the execution is to be portrayed in detail, the plan can go wrong, whether it fails entirely or merely requires modification to succeed. The rule, though, is that the longer a plan’s explanation is in proportion to its execution, measured in word count, the less likely it is to go according to plan, the less likely to succeed (at least in a shape resembling the original).

Chesterton throws the first complication into Ivywood’s plan so soon as he finished laying it out, with the introduction of Dorian. As seen above, of course, this complication Ivywood overcomes. Yet, it is a sign of things to come. This plan is the backdrop of the remaining chapters of the story, and I will not spoil the joy of it here. Suffice it to say, Chesterton fully delivers on the complications.

Conclusion

The Flying Inn is a book everybody should give a try at reading. Its humor is not for some (my sister will tell you this), but Chesterton wrote a work of exceptional insight, humor, and beauty. In my most recent re-read, I have repeatedly paused to admire some point of genius in his writing, sometimes a gem visible only in the light of having read the book before. It’s not a book that starts bright and loud, a book with an explosion on the first page or even a knife-fight the way I do it. It starts a little slow, and yet on re-read that beginning takes on a new dimension, preparing for what will follow on multiple tracks. Please, go read The Flying Inn.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – As with much of Chesterton, there’s a philosophical element here worth at least a few books of thought. Suffice it to say, however logical and precise I am, I simultaneously endorse some spirit of Chesterton here. An understanding of the world which does not understand its symbols and its vivacity is an incomplete understanding, leading finally to a broken logic, as this part of reality, as much as logic, ultimately finds its virtue in God.

On a side note: Lord Ivywood is among my favorite antagonists of all time.