Back to the future

Is it a Chestertonian joke? From the new edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill falls a press release: “The Penguin Classic you need to read before the General Election”, it exclaims in red capital letters. Yet the publication date is given on that same sheet of paper as July 4 – the date of the election itself.

This tricky exhortation – to read a book before it is officially published – suits The Napoleon of Notting Hill admirably. Chesterton’s first novel was published in 1904, but set eighty years later; it opens with a chapter, written in his jaunty, essayistic mode, chortling over the inability of would-be prophets and wise men to extrapolate future developments from present ones. The “prophets of the twentieth century”, the novel’s narrator sighs, as if looking back from the year 1984, “took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened”. But human nature outwits such prophets simply by going on as it always has.

Having established this sceptical premiss, The Napoleon of Notting Hill proceeds to project a future that looks like Chesterton’s present – but one that looks backwards to a past as imaginary as those prophets’ extrapolations.

The fantasy that ensues is simultaneously serious and comic. It has two main characters to match, who are, as one of them notes, “two lobes of the same brain”. (To Chesterton’s first biographer, Maisie Ward, they are “the most living individuals in any of his novels”.) One “lobe” is the whimsical Auberon Quin, a diminutive government clerk – who becomes king of England. In this 1984, sheer indifference has killed off democracy in favour of the arbitrary “despotism” of installing a monarchical “universal secretary”. But the appointment of Quin to the role has radical consequences: he amuses himself by decreeing a “revival of the arrogance of the old medieval cities applied to our glorious suburbs”. This prank entails ostentatious ceremony and old-fangled dressing-up; it also entails “Clapham with a city guard” and “Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens”.

While Quin enjoys inflicting all this on his more sombre friends, he fails to foresee that the joke will not be treated as such by, so to speak, the other lobe. A young man called Adam Wayne is appointed provost of Notting Hill, and turns out to be “a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border of fairyland” – and his fairyland is London. The “intractable” Wayne will not even allow, for one thing, his commercially minded neighbours to flatten any part of his own neighbourhood for the sake of running a new road through it. And defending so mean a thing as Notting Hill’s (fictional) Pump Street from such encroachment becomes a casus belli. Getting medieval in jest begets bloody consequences. The swords and other weapons dusted down for show suddenly regain their purpose. Think not of Chekhov’s gun, but of Chesterton’s halberd.

Many readers have found this novel both amusing and bemusing. Few dwell on a slight slip in logic that the debut novelist makes, late in proceedings, which ought not to be revealed here; the overall effect is unmarred. The TLS’s reviewer ultimately saw it as a “facile extravagance” and a waste of its author’s talent (March 25, 1904), but at least the talent was undeniable – a waggish talent, all too much of its time. “The human race”, that first chapter begins, “to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.” The first page sustains its charm almost for two whole paragraphs, after which it aims a swipe at “humanity as a whole” for being “changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful”: “Men are men, but Man is a woman”. Napoleon is set in a thoroughly male world, and comes loaded with its prejudices as well as much humour at men’s expense.

Another common response to the book is to find it downright sinister – a quality that derives largely from the troubling heroism thrust on Wayne by his creator. Parochial independence becomes something worth fighting for – worth waxing messianic for and, in extremis, committing mass murder for. The spirit of Notting Hill is tainted with the same absurdity as Little England isolationism, in all its flag-waving, Brexit-hugging daftness. Yet Wayne is no mere comic butt. Chesterton gives him not only stirring speeches and bravery in battle, but the ultimate victory of making others think as he thinks about the world. Small Notting Hill may be, but ideologically it is an empire. And violent action is this ideology’s riposte to the modernity with which it is so profoundly incompatible.

Napoleon’s import was clear enough to some. Albert Speer, in prison after the Second World War, came belatedly to read the book, and saw in Wayne a foreshadowing of Hitler. Both were “Caesarean demagogues … who really need a splintered society in which to work”. Wayne is the splinter: he exults in having forced the adjacent London districts to take Quin’s game seriously – not just to think as he thinks, but to go into battle against one another and stand up for themselves as he does.

If it sounds as if too much of Napoleon has just been given away, it should be added that there is more to the story than this; and that Chesterton has his inimitable way of telling it. As Adam Gopnik has put it, “The joy of the book lies in the marriage of Chesterton’s love of feudal romance with his love of the density and mystery of the modern city”. These two loves are united in Wayne’s (ultimately dangerous) metropolitan mysticism:

It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to a romantic gold. The process had begun almost in babyhood, and became habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night, when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has the bold simplicity of blue hills … The artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

“How those railings stir one’s blood”, remarks the once and future provost of Notting Hill, walking down Pump Street one day. A fine species of fanaticism, this: yet, even as he sent it up, Chesterton, a Londoner himself, felt much the same as Wayne. Born close to where some of the key action of Napoleon takes place, in 1874, he could write of the city as a place that embodies “a rather surly love of liberty (or rather of independence)” in its “straggling map” and “patchwork architecture” (this from an essay of 1914). “Crowded and noisy as it is”, Chesterton continues, “there is something shy about London: it is full of secrets and anomalies; and it does not like to be asked what it is for.” In Wayne-ish vein he expresses his adoration for the Dickensian London that is “a sort of half-rebel” – “a city of side streets that only lead into side streets; a city of short cuts – that take a long time”.

Not for him the “more broad and sweeping thoroughfare, in the Continental manner” that has recently opened “between the Strand and Holborn, and called Kingsway”. The very name of such a road seems misplaced. “Through all those creative and characteristic epochs [of the past]”, the essay continues, “there was no King’s Way through London. There was nothing Napoleonic; no roads that could be properly decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with his cannon.” Instead, the egregious Kingsway is to be associated with “the little impenetrable kingdom of rascals that revelled down in Whitefriars, where now rascals of a more mournful kind write Imperialist newspapers”. Localism was Chesterton’s innate antidote to what he saw as expansionism of every variety – not just imperial or capitalist, but also intellectual. “Shaw and Wells and the rest of them were interested only in world-shaking and world-making events” was Chesterton’s retrospective view of the period.

This takes us back to the origins of Chesterton’s novel – alongside his localism, his anti-imperialism and, in the decade before Napoleon’s publication, his condemnation of the Boer War. (“Here, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, is South Africa”, hazards the TLS’s reviewer of the besieged Notting Hill.) The novel’s particular brand of selective nostalgia means nothing without its journalist-author’s passionate engagement with modern times.

Quin, meanwhile, in the original illustrations to the novel provided by W. Graham Robertson, is Max Beerbohm in coat-tails. But Robertson’s illustrations are not reproduced in the new Penguin Classics edition. There are passing references, on facing pages, to “scheming like Moltke” (the military reformer Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, 1800–91) and an unnamed “wonderful play of old Maeterlinck’s” (Intérieur, 1895), as well as the odd Latin tag and other references that would have been familiar to the educated Edwardian mind. The publisher deigns to supply no notes to assist (or remind) the reader, and no introduction to set the novel as a whole in context – to relate the book to Chesterton’s later works of fiction, say, or his evolving religious views. A word about the nineteenth century’s fervour for medievalism wouldn’t have gone amiss – likewise a word about influential utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), with its socialist vision of the year 2000. There is also a story to be told about the novel’s influence (Michael Collins is known to have taken inspiration from it in the fight for Irish independence, a cause that Chesterton supported) and durability (it has stayed in print over the past eleven decades even without its newly acquired advantage of being, as that press release insists, “more relevant now than ever before”).

But perhaps, in the age of Reform UK, it has been deemed best to let The Napoleon of Notting Hill speak for itself.

Michael Caines is an editor at the TLS

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