One of the benefits of surgery is it gives you plenty of time to read more books. I actually finished this next one just before my surgery. Because it was scheduled for the afternoon, I spent the whole day reading to distract myself from the pre-surgery nerves. And so it is that Mr G. K. Chesterton’s book What’s Wrong with the World became by eighth book out of the list.
Plot summary
I’m going to struggle to give you a plot summary, folks. Mainly because I think Mr Chesterton was struggling to build one in. This is a non-fiction work and read like a collection of vaguely related articles. However, I am lead to believe that it was written as a complete work, so I’ll endeavour to give it a summary.
Essentially, this book looks at England in 1910, where everyone has identified that all is not well, but no one can agree on what is needed to fix the various social issues. Chesterton notes that you can’t fix something unless you know what you want it to look like when it is fixed. Fair call. If you don’t know what ideal you’re aiming towards, it’s very hard to get there.
Having made this his thesis, Chesterton sets out to expound what the ideal is, starting from the base unit of society: the family. Over the course of the book he covers education, housing, votes for women, the problem with imperialism and the issue of eugenics.
What I liked: He’s a funny man
The copy I have of this book came to me second hand. This gave me the joy of discovering that the previous owner had highlighted some of the more witty lines throughout the text. You have to hand it to Chesterton, he is very clever. I picked out a few of my favourites for you to enjoy below:
…the woman does not work because the man has told her to and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed
Chapter 6, page 106
I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.
Chapter 7, page 46
The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket.
Chapter 5, page 37
There are many more quips like that, which I for one had a chuckle over.
He also makes some salient points about the nature of families which still hold true over 100 years later. People still want a house for their families. Women are still struggle to find the balance between family and work. Much could still be tried of the old ideals which we thrust from us in our race to the nebulous future. For these points, the book is certainly worth reading.
What I struggled with: Philosophers who write books are annoying
As you may have guessed, I struggled with the lack of clear structure in this book. Chesterton took me on a wide ramble through several apparently unrelated parenthetical chapters in this work. Perhaps it’s just the pragmatism of the female he writes about, but I didn’t appreciate it. I found myself losing the train of ideas which made understanding his whole argument difficult.
I also found that while he did point out several notable problems and suggest some fixes, on the whole he left the problem and the solution still somewhat in haze at the end of the book. Don’t reach for this book if you are hoping for solutions.
Mr Chesterton was a bit of a philosopher, so I must give him leniency for rambling and losing sight of the practical. I am afraid that I don’t appreciate this style of writing a great deal, but on the whole it was still an interesting read, with a few diamonds amid the rough. However, I hold that if you want to see Chesterton at his best, you had better read The Father Brown Mysteries instead.
