See also:

Homer

Odyssey

Iliad translations

I have to say first I don't much care for the Iliad. All the really juicy stuff about the Trojan War, like how it started with the kidnapping of Helen by Paris who whisked her away to Troy and how it ended with that great trick of a wooden horse—none that is in Homer's epic poem.

Instead he plunks us into the tenth year of the Greek and Trojan conflict where we spend the entire story, subjected to continual militaristic bombast. All the way we can enjoy such exciting details as the long listing of every Greek ship and every notable Greek leader who sets out for Troy. It was probably rousing stuff for the ancient Greeks but, as they say, "it killed the ancient Greeks and now it's killing me".

To be fair, there is some juicy non-war material in the Iliad too. Like the spat between the Greeks (Achaeans, actually—from the Achaean, or Mycenaean, civilization that later developed into Greece) Achilles and Agamemnon that started with the latter general "dishonouring" a priest's daughter. The conspiring of the rather petty Olympian gods in the affairs of humans, usually against the Trojans but often against each other. (Homer practically invented the personalities of the Greek gods from Zeus on down, with which we have become so familiar—many of us from watching Xena, no doubt.) The day-long duel between the Greek Ajax and the Trojan Hector. The killing of Patroclus by Hector. The killing of Hector by Achilles.... Okay, most of it is about fighting.

The theme of the Iliad has been said to be that war, particularly among the Aegean people, is terrible, bloody and pointless. In which case the Iliad might fall into the same category as such horrific anti-war novels of modern times as All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch-22. But I can't help but feel this is a latter-day misinterpretation. Homer is involving his readers (or listeners rather) in the struggles of the characters in the epic poem not to denounce war but to tell what was to them a fascinating story. He was inspiring great fellow feeling among the scattered communities of the Greek world, uniting them with feelings of a common heritage, including bloodshed for national and personal honour.

Plus there are just too many characters and gods vying to be the protagonists of the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey in which we get to invest our sympathy in one great literary character. If we have to settle on one character here though, it's got to be Achilles. We can read the Iliad as a tragedy centred on this flawed hero whose pride gets the better of him in dealing with his fellow Greeks (his petulant withdrawal from the fighting until he gets everything his way) and whose thirst for revenge gets the better of him in dealing with the enemy (his pursuit of Hector although it's pretty certain Hector's death will lead to his own). Then it makes some kind of sense as a tragedy.

To really get the Iliad, it helps to know the mythical history leading up to where this poem begins, you have to recognize the great names thrown around, and you have to try to imagine what it must have felt like to the Greeks at the time.

It's still worth reading though, even without that background knowledge, since so many of our cultural references are still based on the Homeric tales. But you'll get so much more out of it if either (a) you are an ancient Greek or (b) you get a good translation with notes to explain everything. (Check out the commentary on Iliad translations.)

But, the sequel, the Odyssey—now there's a tale I can get into.

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See also:

Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Old Man and the Sea

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The Sun Also Rises

See the serious writing student

It may seem strange to pick In Our Time as Hemingway's greatest story collection because many individual stories in later collections have become more familiar — and are arguably more accomplished than these earlier tales.

However, Hemingway's early stories set a new standard for story-writing after the First World War and for years to follow. Although none of the pieces of In Our Time stand out as blockbusters suitable for movie treatment, unlike some later Hemingway stories, they are uniformly excellent. They also hang together well. In fact Hemingway gives each story a chapter number as if they together form a continuing narrative.

In these stories we can see the serious young student of writing reach a mature level of assurance in developing his own style, a style that was unlike any before. Today when we read these stories we may not be as aware of how revolutionary they were, since the direct language and the understated sardonic attitude have become part of the mainstream, adopted to some degree by almost every popular writer since then. Yet, in our day, the stories of In Our Time read with a conflicted simplicity that is still fresh.

The book introduces Nick Adams, a character apparently standing in for Hemingway, who will appear in dozens of his stories over the years. We see him at various points of his upbringing and early adult life in rural and backwoods America. The naturalistic stories are interspersed by contrasting vignettes from the war, usually told in the first person.

But it is the finely honed matter-of-fact style that makes the emotional undercurrent so forceful — whether the story concerns Nick's relationship with his doctor father, his being down and out riding the rails, or a horrific incident during the war. Here is one of the latter vignettes in its entirety:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the
morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of
water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was down in the water with his head on his knees.

Not a word too much or too little. Hemingway knows exactly what to leave in and take out. 

The collection ends with one of the strangest stories you'll likely read, "The Big Two-Hearted River" in two parts. Nick returns to an old fishing haunt and goes fishing. That's it. No other characters. No dialogue. No obvious conflict with man, nature or oneself. Just a man going methodically about his recreation with great skill and attention to detail. And somehow it's disquieting. Has he just returned from the war? Is he recuperating? Is he trying to recover the past? Is he escaping the past? Or is it just an uneventful story about fishing?

— Eric

© Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.

See also:

G. K. Chesterton

The Man Who Was Thursday

The not-so-holy mysteries

The Innocence of Father Brown is the first of five collections of mystery stories featuring Chesterton's canny priest. It's probably the best and it introduces the holy detective—as well as his sometime opponent and sometime collaborator, Flambeau. But there are great stories in each collection.

I'm very fond of Father Brown. This, despite several potential problems.

For one thing, the plots of these stories are implausible. They are part of the tradition of British murder mysteries that the later American hardboiled school revolted against. Murders are carried out in ridiculously complicated fashions, in ways that no crimes are ever committed in the real world.

Father Brown is the prototype of the intuitive amateur sleuth (like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and TV's Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote) who runs into murders everywhere he goes, and manages to solve the crimes with only one or two clues when thorough, professional investigators are stumped.

Nor is the character of Father Brown fleshed out to make him more sympathetic. We have no idea of his background, his actual age (his elderliness varies in the stories), his parish (he turns up all over the world), any of his daily life—apart from solving murders and spouting intriguing observations.

And he's a priest, for godsake. An unusual priest, granted. But his main interest in uncovering criminals is not to serve earthly justice but to save their immortal souls.

All this would seem to add up to a ghastly reading experience, especially for the non-religious, or anti-religious, reader. But it doesn't.

The mysteries are extremely clever on the most superficial level, with several innovations on the classic locked-door mystery and other more novel situations. But on top of that, they involve an understanding of human nature—or at least of how people behave in society. Or, more to the point, how they perceive in society. Father Brown solves crimes by sharing the perpetrators' insight into human perception which allows them to commit the deeds and him to uncover them. He sees what others, including the readers, do not, even when it is right before our eyes. When we reach the solution in a Father Brown mystery, we're less likely to exclaim, "Wasn't that smart!" than to wonder, "Of course, it's so obvious—how come I never realized it?"

Not always though. In about a third of the stories I saw the solution coming from a long way off. I suspect though this is because these stories, like the mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe, have become embedded in our culture. The surprise has worn off because the trick has been replayed so many times in stories, movies and television shows since it was invented by these masters.

What about the religious content though? I prefer to read it as moral content, apart from any denominational standpoint. Interestingly, Chesterton wrote the first volume of Father Brown stories long before he became a Catholic. Even an old atheist like me can appreciate the priest's pointed comments. They are paradoxical, provocative and witty—often profound—sounding just like Chesterton in his non-fiction writing. One of the provoking claims made repeatedly by Father Brown is that true religion is on the side of science and reason, opposed to cheap and self-serving mysticism (what today we would call New Age philosophy).

Another point often made is that the apparent villains deserve Christian charity rather than outraged justice. In "The Chief Mourner of Marne" (from The Secret of Father Brown) he makes a remarkable speech castigating the do-gooders who turn against their object of pity when his horrendous crime is revealed:

"We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction.... We have to say the word that will save them form hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon."

Replace the religious with secular imagery, substitute rehabilitation for salvation, and the conservative Chesterton is revealed to be of the same mind as the contemporary "bleeding-heart" liberal. (He, of course, would never accept this substitution.)

You may agree or disagree with Father Brown, but after a few stories you get a good sense of how he understands the world. You also get a good sense of the man—he becomes a lovable character, which is a remarkable achievement given how little we know about him. Perhaps Chesterton would say we don't have to know facts about him if we know him, and that we best know him by knowing what is essential to him.

Is Father Brown an eternal character? In The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown (1987, recommended if you can find it), Martin Gardner predicts that as the years pass the fictional exploits of both Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown will continue to be read and relished. However, while Conan Doyle's stature as a writer and thinker will diminish, Chesterton's will grow, he says.

Here's my own guess: both writers will become virtually unknown except as the names associated with their created characters. And Sherlock Holmes will far outlive Father Brown in the general public imagination. Father Brown will live on however, and Chesterton with them (to his chagrin if he could know it), for a smaller group of aficionados who appreciate the greater literary and intellectual complexity of the stories over the simpler Sherlockian morality tales.

AS for now, well, we don't live in the future. And in the present Father Brown is still a great character of popular fiction. Enjoy.

Selected Father Brown stories are also available in various collections. I have two such anthologies, one from Penguin and one from Woodsworth, each called just Father Brown, although the story lineups are different. These editions are good starting points, since they offer a choice of the best of the 50 stories from the five separate volumes. The stories I would consider essential are "The Blue Cross" (the first Father Brown story), "The Queer Feet", "The Invisible Man", "The Dagger with Wings", "The Worst Crime in the World", "The Blast of the Book" and "The Green Man".

If possible though, get The Innocence of Father Brown. If you like those stories, you'll have four more volumes of great experiences to look forward to.

— Eric

© Copyright 2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.