Remembering Father Brown
In the 1960s, when I used to go visit my grandparents, first in Bombay, then briefly in Madras, and finally, before my grandfather died, in Bangalore, I’d look forward to long, uninterrupted hours of reading. My Thatha had collections of P. G. Wodehouse (first editions they were some of them—I could kick myself for not being bold enough to ask for a few when I had the chance. Im sure he would have given them to me and I have no idea what happened to them. He had endless volumes of Agatha Christie and the entire Sherlock Holmes Long and Short Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
There’s an author photo for you!
He had another set of books by G. K. Chesterton, with a “dull” and “very short” Catholic priest from Essex as the unlikely PI character in a series of mysteries no one else could crack. I was a compulsive reader and not in the least picky. I read everything I could lay my hands on, so Father Brown was in there. I must confess he didn't leave the enduring impression on me that Poirot did, or Holmes, or Miss Marple, or any of the goofy Wodehouse characters, but for years I I remembered a rather grisly story that involved the switching of heads, which also served as my first introduction to the French Revolution and the instrument of the guillotine. You’d think I’d have had nightmares about such things but if I was distressed at all, I don’t remember it.
When PBS aired reruns of the BBC TV Father Brown series, I had the kind of slightly fractured feeling you get when you revisit a childhood home and find that it has shrunk. It wasn’t just that the stories had been reset in the 1950s, as opposed to an earlier time when the Insurrection and the Reign of Terror were relatively fresh in public memory. Certainly a much more interesting time than the staid 1950s.
So I downloaded the Complete Collection, which is now accessible as a free iBook, and ventured through it. Here are all the things I didn't remember. It’s likely they weren’t things my childhood reader self was looking for, and so I never spotted them then.
I see the repeated occurrences of moral paradoxes, and the honor paid to humility and reason. I see the spiritual and the rational at work, and the structure of each story as it plays out the erroneous conclusions of police and the machinations of criminals. Everything’s resolved and there’s never any doubt that Father Brown’s correct.
The description of landscapes is crisp and clear: this is from The Strange Crime of John Boulnois:
Above him, at the angle of the steep green bank of the terraced garden, was one of those small picturesque surprises common in gate old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial at the highest point in the centre, Kidd could see the finger of the dial standing up dark against the sky like a dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to the idle clock.
But I also see a frank disparagement of foreigners, never mind if they’re Irish, Russian, French, or just unspecified foreigners. A “bellowing voice” thunders out a foreign name loudly and unintelligibly. It’s a remarkable portrait of how English people regarded the other in the years these books were written. What is unusual is how Father Brown is seen more than once by others as being partial to those who were “wicked and foreign and even partly black.”
So there. It’s complicated. I can see why the TV producers made the choices they did. But I think I’ll be remembering these books from here on, more vividly than the rather obvious TV versions. An argument in favour of rereading.
