I will endeavor to take you through Chabon’s meanderings, highlighting key insights along the way. Be sure you are wearing your most comfortable walking shoes.

1.    The book begins with a journey into the unknown. For which, of course, you will need a map. Maps have the power to fire the imagination. The most seductive maps are the ones with unmarked, unexplored territories at their outer edges. This is where the doubts begin and conjectures are spawned.

2.    Victorians had a habit of seeing double. Success was invariably haunted by failure and marital fidelity seemed to always conceal an adulterous love. Sherlock Holmes, like other classic Victorian narratives, is a series of dualities, of “braided pairs”. None more so than the archetypal pair of Holmes and Watson, who have only Quixote and Sancho “as rivals in the hearts of readers and in the annals of imaginary friendship”.

In creating the detective novel genre, Conan Doyle reengineered the process of story telling. Nearly all of Holmes’ stories are “stories of people who tell their stories and, every so often, the stories those people tell feature people telling stories (about what they heard or saw on the night in question)”. All these stories, which enable the reconstruction of the crime, mesh neatly, one folding into and engaging the other. Conan Doyle did not invent the nested story, but he may have perfected it.

Another aspect of Conan Doyle’s genius was his ability to convince Sherlock followers that every word they were about to read was true. In fiction, as in stage magic, the pleasure depends entirely on the audience’s knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled and is, in fact, prepared to participate in creating the illusion. This unwritten contract between magician and audience, between writers of fiction and their readers, is the essential difference between fiction and lies. In fiction, the writer and the reader are in it together.

3.    We, as a species, are drawn to the darkness. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment…these are things we have brought upon ourselves. In the Bible and in Greek myths, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. The world of Norse gods and men and giants, depicted by Ingri D’Aulaires in a stunning series of lithographs “of whimsical and brutal delicacy”, begins in darkness and ends in darkness. In the context of that darkness, everything that is beautiful in the Norse world is something that glints.

Thor was my favourite Norse god. A close second was the mischievous Loki. Loki, Chabon reminds us, “cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it; he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.”

4.    The epic fantasy, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, is that “once upon a time” world we knew in our childhood imaginations, a world where animals spoke and magic worked. But all that has disappeared. Epic fantasy is “haunted by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt”. Chabon calls it a “thinning”, a diminishing of humankind that invokes in all of us the ache of nostalgia.

5.    Plot and its “gloomy consigliere”, Theme, are, in many ways, the enemies of Character. Character brings “roundness”, describes our humanity, our contradictions and desires absent of any abstractable message or moral.

6.    Chabon rues the decline of comic books as a diversion. Children, he points out, did not abandon comics; comics in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment (mostly in the form of graphic novels), abandoned children. He then prescribes the cure: do not tell stories that we think kids of today might like; rather, “we should tell stories that we would have liked as kids: twisted endings, nobility and bravery where it’s least expected, and the sudden emergence of a thread of goodness in a wicked nature”. Children are also fully capable of managing an intricate, involved, involving mythology as long as it is also accessible and comprehensible at any point of entry. The “layering of intricate lore and narrative completeness” was a hallmark of the Superman comics and their kin.

7.    Ambivalence toward technology is the underlying theme of apocalypse-based fiction like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We are, as such, accustomed to thinking of stories that depict the end of the world and its aftermath as essentially science fiction. These stories typically deal with “the changed nature of society in the wake of cataclysm”: strange new priesthoods, theocracies in which mutants and machinery are taboo, etc. Inevitably these new societies mirror and comment upon our own. “That they can hide behind the fig leaf that a satiric or religious purpose provides, that they portray the conventional realism of a world without supercomputers, starships or eight-foot feline warriors from the planet Kzin, gives them the status of relative legitimacy.”

The underlying model for the post-apocalypse adventure story is Robinson Crusoe… “depicting as heroic, if problematic, a lone attempt to impose a bourgeois social order on an irrational empty wilderness” after the bomb or virus or windstorm strikes.

8.    A great ghost story, like M.R. James’ Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad!, is all psychology. There is a perception that the impossible is vying with the clear and undeniable evidence of the senses; and there is the range of emotions brought on by that perception.

The protagonists are often innocents who brush up against “the omnipresent malevolence of the world”. The sins for which they are punished are more than likely to be virtues – curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone eras and long-gone ancestors. And, often, their punishment is grim.

Ghost story writers, like James and H.P. Lovecraft, share a hyper-acute sense of the past, with “a taste for old books and arcane manuscripts, for neglected museums and the libraries of obscure historical societies, and for ancient buildings, in particular those equipped with attics and crypts”.

9.    The comic strip is and has always been a literary form that “braids words and pictures inextricably into a story”. Chabon decries the fact that, today, “the pictures have dwindled to a bare series of thumbnail sketches…while the notion of story has atrophied almost to nonexistence”.

10.    Here’s the final leg of the journey through Chabon’s fertile and somewhat foreboding literary mind. Evoking the spirit of the golem (the concept and conception of which has fascinated him since childhood), Chabon removes from the author the cloak of anonymity and the protection of any and all disclaimers. “If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchniks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”

Clues:
1.    Bird burning on the third element of stove (8 letters)
2.    Veteran’s Administration endowment to drifter (7 ketters)
3.    Celebrate around beginning of Lent, to some extent (6 letters)
4.    More than one weaving machine appears (5 letters)
5.    Outfit switched in forum (7 letters)
6.    A name is lost to forgetfulness (7 letters)
7.    Hear unconfirmed reports from lodgers (7 letters)
8.    Retaliates for some craven gesture (7 letters)
9.    Actor in complex tragedy (5 letters)
10.    Al Capone shows muffler to pilot (8 letters)

Answers:
1.    Flamingo (Flaming + O)
2.    Vagrant (V.A. + grant)
3.    Partly (Party + L)
4.    Looms (two meanings)
5.    Uniform (anagram: in forum)
6.    Amnesia (anagram: a name is)
7.    Roomers (rumors)
8.    Avenges (crAVEN GEStures)
9.    Extra (complEX TRAgedy)
10.    Scarface (scarf + ace)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is the story of a perky and prodigious 11-year old who, to save her father, insinuates herself into a murder investigation. Sir Apropos of Nothing by Peter David relates the adventures of a young and very cynical squire who finds himself charged with the rescue of the Princess of Isteria.

Sweetness takes place in a Georgian English countryside. Apropos takes place in The Middle Lands.

Sweetness is a first novel by a Canadian mystery buff. Sir Apropos is the fifty somethingth novel by a New York-based sci fi icon.

Alan Bradley was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and Director of Television Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan for 25 years until his early retirement in 1994. His interest in things mysterious took a sharp left turn when, in 1989, in collaboration with William Sarjeant, he published the classic Ms Holmes of Baker Street. The premise of the book, which engendered a firestorm of controversy upon publication, is that Holmes was, in fact, a woman…one twice pregnant to boot.

David is another matter. His list of credits is a mile long and he is not completely inaccurate when he refers to himself as “a writer of stuff”. Lots of cool stuff, mind you. He got his start in comics, penning stories for The Incredible Hulk at Marvel and Aquaman at DC. He also did work for the Dark Horse Comics miniseries, The Scream, among others. Back at Marvel, he wrote the comic book spin-off of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. A prolific writer, David is best known for his Star Trek and Babylon 5 novels. Sir Apropos of Nothing began a new phase and a new genre for David: fantasy.

So what are the aforementioned similarities between Sweetness and Apropos?

To begin with, both are about young adults. In the case of Flavia, very young, but she had what my mother would call an old head. Apropos simply grew up too quickly, starting with a misbegotten birth and ending with a narrow escape from an unwanted betrothal.

Both strain credulity. But let’s face it, if you are prepared to be swept away by a pre-teen as she unravels a murder mystery that spans decades, you are obviously in for the game. And Apropos is, after all, a fantasy, so you must take the fantastic in stride.

When her taciturn father becomes a suspect in the slaying of a certain Horace Bonepenny, Flavia sets out to find the real murderer. Naturally, our little Miss Marple manages to outthink and outflank Scotland Yard. The resourceful Flavia begins her sleuthing by going through old newspapers in the village library; she ferrets out the connection with old crimes committed at Greyminster prep school by Bonepenny and the nefarious “third man”. It is the latter who snatches up Flavia and comes this close to doing her in. In the end, our irrepressible little heroine returns the object of everyone’s affection, a rare Black Penny stamp that nearly brought down the Empire around Queen Victoria over a hundred years earlier, to a grateful King George VI. Peace and prosperity are restored to the Buckshaw Estate.

As for Apropos, well, he manages by hook and mostly by crook to survive the fates and his own flawed character. He serves as squire to the enigmatic Sir Umbrage of the Flaming Nether Regions, does in the fallen hero, Tacit One-Eye, outfoxes the dreaded Warlord Shank, escapes the grotesque Harpers Bizarre to say nothing of a herd of outraged unicorns, manouevers around Meander, the mad Vagabond King of the Frozen North, all to return the feisty princess Entipy, banished by Runcible to the Faith Women’s Retreat, to her proper station.

Obviously, both books are fun reads. The yarns are neatly spun. The humor, running from the subtle to the sardonic, is always present.

It is also no surprise that each was to become the first of a series. You could see it coming. The giveaway is the depth of the main character. We love little Flavia, despite her peculiar predilection for poison. We enjoy Apropos, despite his caustic nature and obsessive need for self-preservation. She is a scamp, he a scoundrel. It is fun to see how each, in his or her own way, manages to get from here to there.

Bradley’s Buckshaw Chronicles follow up Sweetness with The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag (released by Random House this past March) and the upcoming Hang, Gypsy! Dance, Gypsy!, slated to appear in 2011.

The Apropos trilogy also includes The Woad to Wuin and Tong Lashing. Darkness of the Light, is the first in a new trilogy of fantasy novels titled The Hidden Earth.

I am not usually drawn to the mystery or fantasy genre. I seldom read novels centered on the adventures of young adults, even ones as precocious as Flavia or Apropos. But my daughter, the librarian, knew I would like these books. In an upcoming post, I will tell you why.

It’s my favourite time of year. Skies are (generally) blue. The snow is a memory and our oversized magnolia tree is blossoming (admittedly early). The 12th iteration of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, which this year runs from April 21 to 25, is just over the horizon.

The Blue Metropolis Foundation, based in Montreal, is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing together the finest writers from around the globe, exposing their work and the issues they confront in a diverse and challenging world. The Blue Met is also active in developing important educational and literacy programs.

Among the international stars you can meet at this year’s festival will be the Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, considered by some “the most significant English language poet born since the second World War”. Also on the stage for readings and discussions will be the distinguished Indian poet Koyamparambath Satchidanandan, the award-winning Israeli novelist Amir Gutfreund, and a couple of the best contemporary fiction writers from Latin America, Salvadoran Horacio Castellanos Moya and Mexican Christina Rivera Garza.

Festival highlights include:

Writers in Peril – The OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor expose the steps being taken by authoritarian regimes to limit access to information in cyberspace.

The Human Face of Genocide – How do writers handle the delicate and gut-wrenching task of capturing and making some sense of the annihilation of whole peoples?

Cartography of Cartooning – Two of Montreal’s most popular cartoonists, Aislin (Terry Mosher) and Serge Chapleau, talk about what they do and how they do it.

Breaking Into the Kidlit Market – Get the skinny on what it takes to succeed in this red-hot publishing segment, from preparing the manuscript to dealing with agents and publishers.

There will be the usual spate of book launches, panel discussions and award ceremonies, as well as workshops for established and emerging writers.

American author Hal Borland once wrote that “April is a promise”. For book lovers, it is one the Blue Met is bound to keep.

It’s hard for most literary types to get excited about business unless, of course, it is the business of publishing. But timeless observations do, on occasion, come from our captains of industry. The daily grind tends to hone their wit, adding punch to perspective. Which are, after all, the building blocks of good quotations.

I made numerous presentations in my former marketing role and I invariably began each with a quotation. Of course, they were usually from Yogi Berra…but that’s another story.

The lead-in quotation was from Lord Beaverbrook, nee Max Aitken, (1879-1964) who made his fortune in Canada but gained his fame in England as owner of the Daily Express. Historians have called him the first Baron of Fleet Street, his newspapers making him, at the time, one of the most powerful men in Britain. While he could be a generous benefactor, he was also a hard-nosed deal maker, so it was no surprise when he declared, “If you can walk over a man once, you can walk over him as often as you like”.

His old masters line makes a perfect bookend with Andrew Mellon’s more famous “Gentlemen prefer bonds”. At the end of the day, though, Aitken enters The Literarian’s pantheon of quotables for this astute observation: “British electors will not vote for a man who does not wear a hat.”

Being at the centre of the information vortex and having a lofty view of human activity and a not so lofty view of human character, publishers have often put to paper thoughts that were insightful, if somewhat harsh at times.

From Allen Neuharth, founder of USA Today: “Nothing kills hope faster than cynicism.”

From Benjamin Bradlee of The Washington Post: “News is the first rough draft of history.”

From B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine and grandfather of Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes Jr., these two gems: “Action without thinking is like shooting without aiming” and “In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina”.

It should be no surprise that the same cleverness that spawned some of the most successful marketing campaigns would also engender some of the more brilliant insights into the human condition.

David Ogilvie, legendary founder of Ogilvie and Mather who raised the bar with his wordy Rolls Royce ads, reminded us that “The consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”  His was a half-hearted defence when he wrote in his opus, Confessions of an Advertising Man, that “advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things”. Ogilvie opined that “if each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants”.

More biting was Bruce Barton’s “Conceit is God’s gift to little men”.

Barton (1886-1967) was the most famous advertising man of his day, thanks to his best-selling book The Man Nobody Knows. Published in 1925, the book compared Jesus to a successful businessman.

In 1919 Barton joined with fellow workers from the United War Work campaign (that raised money for soldiers overseas) to form the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne that would become the second largest agency network in the world as BBDO Worldwide. For General Mills, Barton created the character of Betty Crocker, one of the most enduring symbols in American advertising.

Barton’s authored countless magazine articles and newspaper columns focusing on the themes of optimism and success. It was he who penned the famous “when you are through changing, you are through”.

Also from Barton: “It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.”

John Wanamaker (1838-1922), who established Wanamaker’s department stores and a merchandising and advertising genius in his own right, will forever be remembered and quoted for this quip: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”.

It goes without saying that the business gurus would have much to say and some of what they said would have staying power. There is no better example than Stephen Covey’s maxim: “Your attitude determines your altitude”.  Covey, of course, is the self-help master that brought you The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Which nicely segues into the judgment from Peter F. Drucker, the Father of Modern Management that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.

To close this post, it is probably appropriate to list those quotes that focus squarely on the advantages and evils of capitalism. These are my favourites:

“Under capitalism, man exploits man; under socialism, the reverse is true.”
(Polish proverb according to Leo Rosten)

“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.” (Frank Borman, Chairman, Eastern Airlines)

“The quarrel between capitalism and communism is whether to sit upstairs or downstairs in a bus going the wrong way.” (Reverend John Stewart)

Far be it for me to argue.

It is a story with a love triangle. Not just any ordinary love triangle, mind you, but one including a man, a woman and an elephant. Incredibly, the triangle is probably the most normal part of the tale.

It’s also a story about the circus, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, no less. I haven’t read a book about the circus since Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes came out back in ’62. Circuses have always been dark places for me. It is not surprising then that I found Water for Elephants a dark book. It is about the seamier and steamier side of a life not evident under ‘The Big Top’. It takes place during the Great Depression, adding a layer of dreariness and desperation.

It’s a story about being trapped. Jacob Jankowski, in a decrepit body dumped in a claustrophobic nursing home where only memories of his days in the circus provide relief. Marlena, the star of an equestrian act, in a bad marriage to an abusive husband. Rosie the elephant, in a circumstance hardly of her choosing only seconds away from the painful prodding of a bull hook. All three in a world of wonder, excitement, passion and abject cruelty.

Most importantly, it’s a story about escape. Jacob loses everything when his parents are killed in a car accident. He runs away with the circus where his training as a veterinarian would come in most handy. He then has to escape the circus when the darkness begins to close in. Finally, altogether too many years later, he has to escape the straightjacket of his confinement and run back to the only home he ever really knew.

Inevitably, the book, as life, comes full circle. It is the way.

Interesting sidebar on this book and on Sara Gruen, a Canadian born and bred author currently residing in an environmentalist community outside Chicago. Despite the moderate acclaim earned by her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, her publisher turned down Water for Elephants. Eventually, she struck a cheap deal with Algonquin. 12 weeks on the N.Y. Times best-seller list and a quarter million dollars later, Gruen was set. Spiegel & Grau paid $5 million for her fourth novel, Ape House and another as-yet-unnamed book.

Eventually, talent, as life, becomes its own reward. It is also the way.

According to the dictionary, the verb unfriend means to “remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook”.

This is a most unfortunate word, coming out of the unlovely side of social media. I am not unaware of the networking realities of Facebook and I am not unsympathetic to those not yet friended who are unhappily burdened with being unattached in a vast interconnected world. In that context, unfriending seems particularly unkind and makes friending in the first place an almost capricious exercise. Being thus uncoupled undercuts one’s sense of belonging and underscores the fleeting uncertainty of friendships altogether.

I am unsure of how the dons of the Oxford American Dictionary made their selection. Apparently, part of the appeal of unfriend was the rarity (unusuality?) of an ‘un’-prefixed word assuming a verb sense of friend, i.e., to friend, that is not used. You do not friend, you befriend. As such, says Christine Lindberg, a senior lexicographer with the dictionary, “unfriend has real lex appeal”.

Oh, really?

Among the contenders for the WOTY Award were a number of sniglets, including:

• intexticated - distracted by texting on a cell phone while driving a vehicle; and
• freemium - a business model in which some basic services are provided for free with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.

There were the compound words and images, my favourite being ‘tramp stamp’, a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman. My only issue here is that I am sure tramp stamp is already several years old.

I also admit to being impressed by the seemingly endless stream of neologisms Twitter is contributing to the English language, many of which vied for Word-of-the-Year. If you don’t like the words, you at least have to love the chutzpah inherent in twitterati and twitterature. With such pretension, it is no wonder that people become tweetaholics.

In fact, the web contributed disproportionately to the lexicon in 2009. Sad, really, when you consider that the beauty and strength of the English language stem directly from the diversity of its sources.

The WOTY winner must “reflect the ethos of the year” and it must “have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance and use”. Unfriend, begat by the spread of social media, may well reflect the ethos and, indeed, the pathos of 2009. But as to having lasting cultural significance, I would think it most unlikely.

(For more on neologisms, please see: Don’t Snigger at Sniglets and A Case of the Twiggles.)

With its famed Museum and Library, Alexandria was the centre of the world for learning and Euclid was just one of a host of distinguished alumni.

Ptolemy, with his Hellenic philosophical bent and Pharaonic aspirations, saw Alexandria as a nexus for commerce, knowledge and dynastic control. The city was a jewel in its conception, planning and construction. The lighthouse at Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was just one of many architectural marvels. But it was the intellectual capital that made Alexandria so rich and its legacy so enduring.

The Library’s collection was vast, housing virtually all the written works of the age. Its only competition was the Library at Pergamum, said by Plutarch to house some 200,000 volumes. Until, that is, Mark Antony turned over the entire Pergamum collection to the Library at Alexandria as a wedding present to his beloved Cleopatra (last of the Ptolemys).

Among the early librarians was Apollonius, author of the poem Argonautica. That epic tells the story of Jason and the heroes who sailed on the Argo to capture the golden fleece from Colchis. Apollonius’ successor was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, credited with having calculated the Earth’s circumference. Eratosthenes was a close friend of Archimedes who came from Syracuse to Alexandria to study and was a frequent visitor of the Museum.

The first head of the Museum was Ctesibius of Alexandria. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps, earning him the title of “The Father of Pneumatics.” His protégé, Hero of Alexandria, created the first steam engine, predating the industrial revolution by two millennia.

The Museum was also the centre of philosophical discourse. Platonists and neoplatonists, stoics and epicureans all passed through the hallowed halls. Neoplatonism was one of the most influential philosophies of late antiquity and Plotinus’ metaphysical writings in the Enneads inspired centuries of pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Gnostic and mystical thought.

The Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, was carried out in Alexandria in stages between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC by Jewish scholars, to whom Philo and Josephus ascribed divine inspiration.

Philo used allegory to fuse and harmonize Greek philosophy and Judaism. There are those who believe that his concept of the Logos as God’s “blueprint for the world” formed the basis of Christianity.

No Literarian post would be complete without at least a few quotes and Philo is good for it:
“Those who give hoping to be rewarded with honor are not giving; they are bargaining.”
“Grey hairs are signs of wisdom…if you hold your tongue.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

In short, Alexandria was the mainspring from which philosophical, mathematical, scientific, medical, cosmological and religious thought emanated for centuries. It was a coming together of genius, a place where ideas were exchanged and creative energy flowed freely.

In the end, Julius Caesar, possibly a tsunami, certainly the inevitable ravages of time, conspired to bring destruction to the Museum, the Library and much of the city itself. The record is not as certain as the result. The Library of Alexandria and all its invaluable contents are gone. The legacy, though, will last forever.

To learn more, get yourself a copy of The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. The authors, Justin Pollard and Howard Reid are noted producers of PBS documentaries. Their intellectual rigor, flare for the dramatic, and accessibility to all audiences are well-honed and shine through in this work.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a versatile and enormously gifted writer. He was also a prolific writer, having published some 80 books, a dozen posthumously. The fact that he was both perceptive and productive, that he combined a discerning eye with a fertile mind, that he saw life through a prism of paradoxes, made it almost inevitable that he would become the source of a near endless array of punchy lines and pithy sayings, so many of which resonate to this day. Unlike my unfortunate and now undone colleague, Chesterton was a man of many ideas and, a century later, there is still little to fault with any of them.

Chesterton had strength of character and conviction. For a self-described ‘rollicking journalist’, he had strongly-held opinions and defended them vigorously.

Still in his 20s, he was one of the few journalists who publicly opposed the Boer War. Over the years, he held fast to his anti-war sentiments. “The only defensible war”, he wrote in his Autobiography (published in 1937), “is a war of defense”.

Chesterton was highly politicized, his politics coloured by his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power.

On the nations’ leadership, he scathingly wrote: “Democracy means government by the uneducated. Aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” And: “When a politician is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”

His take on national pride is a classic: “(Saying) ‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying ‘my mother, drunk or sober’.”

Chesterton’s gregarious manner and wry humor belied a deep troubling over the vagaries, paradoxes and inconsistencies of life. He found answers in Christianity; his books on the subject contained some of his most memorable thoughts, not always religious ones.

From his 1905 Heretics: “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” The sequel, Orthodoxy, appeared three years later and provided this gem: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”

Ultimately, the failings of other societal structures gave way to the constancy and incontrovertibility of faith. From his Introduction to the Book of Job (1907), Chesterton makes it clear that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”. In Christendom in Dublin, published in 1933, he wrote: “Once abolish the God… government becomes the God.” And, finally: “When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything”.

Of course, not all his subjects were lofty; some of his targets were, frankly, of low stature. Consider these observations on thieves: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become theirs so that they may more perfectly respect it.” And “Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”Anything and everything was grist for his always turning, ever-churning mill. “There is no such thing…as an uninteresting subject”, he wrote. “The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

According to Charles Dickens, “trifles make the sum of life”. This has special meaning when it comes to Chesterton, whose keen eyes caught the essence of even the most mundane things. You know someone can put things in their proper perspective when he can write a book called On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered. Perhaps the best example of Chesterton’s ability to turn trivia into timeless truths is his wonderfully witty Tremendous Trifles, published in 1909.

From this classic and others, come the following Chesterton observations worth contemplating:

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.”

With a broad sweep from his unique vantage point, Chesterton managed to take in everything, great and small.

The Gargoyle, published by Doubleday, is the first effort by Andrew Davidson. And it is an extraordinary one. This is a book that successfully slips and slides between realities and magically transcends time. Of course, it is the acceptance of time as non-linear that enables you to define what is and what is not reality.

In other words, if you can suspend disbelief, as the principal character does when Marianne Engel, a beguiling schizophrenic, transports him to a past they supposedly shared together, you will be open to the paradoxes and parallels that run throughout.

In their previous, fourteenth century lives, he was a mercenary felled by a flaming arrow who became a stonemason. She was a novice in the Engelthal monastery; her talents for language found their fullest expression in the stifling Scriptorium. He is now the ex-porn star whose budding career was cut short by a car accident in which he was horribly burned; he becomes a writer telling of a sculptor/temptress whose madness and mastery over stone bring gargoyles to life.

“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole…It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time …They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces, the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment.”

Of course, she also brings him back to life, subtly but relentlessly chipping away at a cynical and contemptuous veneer.

There is always the story behind the story, the underlying message, the over-arching theme that ties a string of apparently disparate tales together. Characters, at least the main ones, are fully developed. And yet they remain inscrutable. They are hardened, yet vulnerable. They are intertwined, yet separate. They are all gargoyles.

In short, this is a book with a remarkable depth.

Parental Guidance: Unless you are into burn victim physiology and psychology, you might find the book a  bit of a struggle for the first 60 pages or so. Just a warning.