The unsavoury attitudes found in novels from writers such as GK Chesterton and Susan Coolidge have ruined some of the fiction I loved most as a child. But where do you draw the line when you return to tainted classics?
When I was 10 or 11, I was consumed by a passion for Golden Age detective fiction. I browsed mildew-smelling secondhand bookshops for Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle, developing secret proto-crushes on both Lord Peter Wimsey and Sherlock Holmes (and wishing I could carry off a monocle). I burned through Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books, and Agatha Christies by the score and I adored GK Chesterton’s Father Brown.
But recently, rereading the stories of the round-faced, stumpy cleric, with his flapping black cassock and his encyclopedic knowledge of human evil, left me feeling cold rather than cosy. Chesterton’s glorious evocations of light, landscape, and unnerving, lurid strangeness remain compelling. But his frequent use of racial stereotypes now slams me repeatedly out of his text. References to “the yellow man”, “a big white bulk … but with the needless emphasis of a black face”, “the fashionable negro … showing his apish teeth” – even the intrinsic evil of a “Turkey carpet” – leave me feeling that the padre’s much-touted broad-mindedness boils down all too often to mere mistrust of any skin-shade other than white.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment