Proctosophy

This review will be kind of a complaint. I've wanted to read Chesterton  for awhile, being interested in his Catholicism and in his reputed brilliance. Brilliant he certainly is, and the start of this book really grabbed me, opening like the kind of breakneck-paced adventure novel that Jules Verne might dream up. It has one of the best first acts of any book I've ever read. After that, though, we get bogged down with the various characters and scenes that don't seem to move the story forward like they should, until finally we have a surreal chase scene that ends up revealing the bad guy as some kind of hidden face of God, a type of Christ, as it were. I guess that's what the author wanted to communicate, but I took it a a big letdown. The spiritual payoff isn't(to me) even good enough to make it worth ruining that first-class story Chesterton had going in the early pages. So overall, a book with promise, promise that went unfulfilled. Also, I loved the poem he starts the book with.