With due deference to the originator of the latest foray in to the world of Father Brown, I doubt many devotees of GK Chesterton’s clerical detective would find the portrayal of the character by Mark Williams to be excellent. The BBC series, now in its ninth season and popular as it appears to be, is such a travesty that Chesterton would recognise neither his fictional hero nor its non-fictional model. Yet it is testimony to the fact that the Father Brown phenomenon, for want of a better word, continues to prosper more than a century after its first appearance in 1911. This new devotional anthology, edited by Stephen Poxon, is a further witness to the fact.
Father Brown was modelled in part on Mgr John O’Connor: an Irishman educated in France by the monks now at Douai Abbey, and then as a seminarian for the Diocese of Leeds at the English College in Rome. A friend of Eric Gill, he was a professional parish priest and most of his ministry was spent in Bradford. There he built a round church in Heights Lane that reflected his growing engagement with the Liturgical Movement, which led to his anonymous 1939 tract on liturgical revival that is at once prophetic, hilariously opinionated, prone to the historical errors common to the time, and both daring and (from our pers-pective) even somewhat conservative in parts.
Gill clearly adopted the liturgical vision of O’Connor’s tract when designing a church himself: St Peter’s, in Gorleston-on-Sea. Blessed with the cultural acquisitions of a continental education, O’Connor also possessed a strong, even combative personality. He was dismissive of bishops and was not averse to sacking his parish choir. His faith, personality and intellect were dynamic enough to lead Chesterton into the Church in 1922.
Chesterton confessed that Father Brown, while inspired by his friend, was no slavish copy or caricature of O’Connor. He admitted to “the grave liberty of taking my friend and knocking him about; beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intelligent countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity, and generally disguising O’Connor as Father Brown. The disguise, as I have said, was a deliberate piece of fiction.”
What Chesterton did capture of O’Connor in Father Brown was his friend’s strength of purpose, intellect and spiritual insight into human nature under the influence of evil. This anthology of excerpts from the Father Brown stories is witness to the success of Chesterton’s endeavour. It is also witness to the fact that the Father Brown stories should not be read solely as crime fiction, but also as Christian literature with a subtle but real apologetic purpose, especially regarding the inescap-
ability of fallen human nature and the constant opportunity for repentance and redemption. There is circumstantial evidence of this in that the chosen excerpts are taken from 35 of the stories (by my count), and cover the entire span of the Father Brown series from 1911 to 1936.
It seems that Father Brown was a manifestation of the ongoing influence of O’Connor on Chesterton’s soul and mind: its climax came with Chesterton’s reception into the Church by O’Connor at the Railway Hotel in Beaconsfield, as witnessed by Dom Ignatius Rice of Douai Abbey, another of Chesterton’s clerical friends.
I suspect that Father Brown is a device by which Chesterton could articulate his reflections on the Catholic formation he was receiving from O’Connor – reflections not so much on the nature of God as the nature of man before God, not least himself. Perhaps Chesterton’s personal concerns are reflected in Father Brown’s repeated concern for the salvation of his antagonists.
This quotidian anthology is structured naturally enough day by day, with a scriptural quotation for which an excerpt from a Father Brown story is chosen to exemplify, amplify or illuminate its significance. Each daily entry concludes with a prayer-reflection by the editor. By its very nature these editorial features are personal; that is is not to say they would not sometimes, indeed often, resonate with the reader. Many of them resist the temptation to be overly self-referential. I found some of them to be a hit-or-miss affair, but I must allow that in future years a non-resonant prayer of today may resonate more strongly.
An example of a day that is fully successful, at least for me, is April 19: the scriptural text is Genesis 35:14 (Jacob’s building of a pillar to the Lord) and the chosen excerpt is from “The Sign of the Broken Sword”, regarding the many monuments to General St Clair – with a concluding prayer for the grace to build memorials to the Lord in one’s heart. Another strikingly successful pairing falls on May 11, which pairs the pithy Genesis 5:24 – “Enoch walked with God” – with a marvellously evocative passage from “The Salad of Colonel Cray” which describes Father Brown’s walk home from Mass through the mists at dawn. On New Year’s Eve a simpler and entirely different approach is taken, and quite successfully.
At the beginning of the book there is a useful – probably necessary for many – set of points on how to use it as a tool for prayer. In essence, it is a brief guide to what our modern brethren like to call lectio divina. It is a useful enough guide, save for one jarring clause after the sensible counsel to ask God to speak to the reader through what is read: “believe that he will do so”. This is rather a dangerous injunction if read too literally, for God does not speak at our command – indeed sometimes he keeps silence to serve His will for our good. The reader would be better to amend the wording to “believe that he can do so.” Even better would be for the reader to pray to be able to hear anything that God might wish to say.
Other quibbles are minor, and perhaps are merely matters of taste. Several translations are used for the daily scriptural quotations, and among them the New International Version is rather incongruent. A single translation from among its several would have been better: perhaps the English Standard Version revision of the Revised Standard Version, which is noble, clear, and soon to be the translation used in the liturgy in England and Wales. Also, the use of a sans-serif typeface is a pity. An early 20th-century English serif typeface (perhaps Gill’s Joanna) would have been more appropriate, being more attractive and less aggressively modern.
Nevertheless, this devotional anthology of Father Brown is greatly to be welcomed. Chesterton would surely be pleased that Stephen Poxon has discerned and shared the deeply Christian ethos of the Father Brown stories. While the anthology will probably have its fullest effect on those already familiar with Father Brown, it is to be hoped that it might entice those unfamiliar with the shambling sleuth to take up these sparkling stories, and so share in their precious legacy.
Dom Hugh Somerville Knapman is the author of Father Brown Reforms the Liturgy (Arouca Press, 2021). Stephen Poxon’s A Pleasant Year with Father Brown is published by DLT at £16.99
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