Reviews for The Incredulity of Father Brown

The average rating for The Incredulity of Father Brown based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-12 00:00:00 Harlan Arnold This collection contains eight short Father Brown mysteries. The guy justifiably earned his place among the greatest detectives of all time. He is probably the most harmless of them all. Consider Sherlock Holmes as an example: he never shied away from a little action and was in a fairly good physical shape. If you recall famous American hard-boiled detectives: Sam Spade, Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, and Lew Archer - these guys took and delivered quite a lot of beating during their investigations. Father Brown is as timid as they make them: from his description he looks even less prone to violence than a typical old maiden Miss Marple. As such while almost all of these stories deal with murders they are never about catching the culprit: Father Brown's task is to just expose him/her. The mysteries themselves are quite complicated (some of them I would even call too complicated) with some paradoxes thrown in for a good measure. The resolution of the paradoxes are at times trivial (once they are explained), sometimes implausible, and sometimes why-the-hell-have-not-I-think-about-it type. With all of them I think Chesterton have to be credited with creation some of the tropes even modern mysteries and thrillers still use - I can think of at least two out of the top of my head. I am done with my praise, now it is time for some criticism. It looks like Chesterton was deeply religious person and he never missed a chance to show how feeble-minded and prone to superstitions the minds of atheists are. In fact the acting Catholic priest Father Brown always appears to be least superstitions of all present characters. As an atheist the appropriate modern reaction would be to shout to the whole world (which really does not care) that I am offended and rate this book with 1 star. Being old-school I just laughed at it and ignored it; I do judge this book on all its merits. The writing style makes for slow read - I cannot even figure out the reason for this. The first collection was more lighthearted; the second and this books failed to capture the lightheartedness again. This would be only part of the reason, but this is the only one I can think of. The rating is 3.5 stars. I though about rounding it down until I finished the last story dealing with evil Bolsheviks; the final words of Father Brown (and through him the author's) were nothing short of prophetic; they were not related to Bolsheviks by the way. I was very much impressed and as a result the rating was rounded up: 4 stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-04 00:00:00 Bruce Whatley �To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven�. Thus we can read in the book of Ecclesiastes, and there is justice in these words for if ever there be a time and a season for pseudo-philosophical waffle revolving, in countless tedious variations around the same topic, or for pompous prose which is occasionally brightened by a witty statement, more remarkable for its rarity than for its brilliance, then surely this will be the time and season for Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his amateur detective Father Brown because the two of them will serve this purpose best and impress a smug face on the bland surface of boredom. I did not particularly enjoy the first volume of Father Brown�s adventures, and I can�t really say why I bothered to pick up the volume The Incredulity of Father Brown, except maybe that the titles of the stories sound very mysterious and promising. Who would not think of something portentous when reading the words The Oracle of the Dog, or of something memorable at sight of The Curse of the Golden Cross? But rest assured that Chesterton is a cheat: He will lure you into reading a story by giving it a title that tickles your imagination only as an excuse for edifying you with his religious views and spoon-feeding you with bits of awkwardly devised story-telling. His characters are puppets on strings that can be seen from miles away, his plots are repetitive and far-fetched [1], and the only thing that seems to matter to Chesterton is to hammer home his message, a message I ironically agree with, namely that so-called atheists and materialists are far from being religious in that they are ready to jump at any superstition or scientific theory as a stand-in for the rejected belief in God. You can see this in our day and age when the indisputable phenomenon of climate change has turned from a challenge that has to be addressed by the use of human ingenuity into an ersatz religion for lots of people, with Friday being their day for attending their particular service. Nevertheless, for all the truth that there may be in Chesterton�s premise, it is still very tiring to see every single story in this collection boil down to that kind of truism, which is handed down in an annoyingly self-complacent tone. Sooner or later the preacher and the dinner table philosopher will take over and hijack the poorly written story with his avuncular maunderings. It got so much on my nerves after a while that if I ever ran into Father Brown in real life, I would probably force him to swallow the umbrella he always carries along with him and then open it up at the last moment in order to give him some more tangible cause for his hitherto merely moral inflation. You have to give it to this book, though, that the boredom it may cause does not exactly benumb the reader�s mind but can also stimulate it as my last suggestion showed: Reading it, I rather feel like writing a book myself. A self-help book along the lines of Twenty Ways of How to Help a Man Become a More Likeable Person with His Own Umbrella. [1] In one story, for instance, he expects us to believe that three tramps team up to kill a man who insulted them donkey�s years ago, and commit their crime in a most roundabout way.