Digital Sextant

The Innocence of Father Brown

by G.K. Chesterton; Narrated by Brian Roberg for Librivox.org

Obviously, I enjoy mystery stories.  And I understand that G.K. Chesterton is a revered and honored British writer, and that his father brown mysteries are most enduring and likeable.  But they didn’t do much for me.

Don’t get me wrong, they were clever enough, with some nice reparte between the eponymous mystery-solving priest and his quarry, but the action was almost always removed from the story, and the solving of the mystery was as often as not done by F.B. in his mind at some date or place far away from the telling of the events.  In one story, he purported to have solved an age-old murder mystery and be journeying the country to determine if ethics demanded that he reveal his sources.

The stories are also laced through with a religiosity that doesn’t really make sense to me–Father Brown returns to “reason” a lot as justification for faith, but doesn’t really explain what he means other than that the world is mysterious.  Sigh.  Perhaps I’m just doomed not to understand GKC books — I had the same problems with The Man Who Was Thursday.

Father Brown fits that genre, of course, of the old biddy detective, like Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher, people count him out because he’s round-faced and wears a funny hat–but unlike the odious Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, Father Brown keeps a brain under his.   His constant companion and friend is the former-thief turned private investigator, Flambeaux.  I like the relationship these two have, though it makes you wonder how Flambeaux makes any money, if Father Brown is always around mooching cases and solving them.

Librivox’s reader, Brian Roberg, did a fine job making his way through the text.  He read with precision and emotion, but didn’t go overboard with the whole production.  Just solid work.