Manalive

G.K. Chesterton is one of my favorite authors for his lyrical style. Manalive is one of his remarkable pieces of fiction and it opens with one of the most wonderful descriptions of wind:

A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. It a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world… Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat… There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.

With this, the reader is introduced to the young men and women staying at a boarding house in London.

Innocent Smith is a strange young man who is blown by this wonderful wind into the boarding house's garden and he brings much more than a breath of fresh air into the lives of several people "who had long been consciously imprisoned in the commonplace." Mr. Smith is quite an original character as we see very quickly.

He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made a giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth when most of us grow old.

Soon though, many questions are raised about Mr. Smith and who he is. Is he some insane monster, murdering people, stealing, and tricking young women into a terrible fate? Or is he something entirely different?

I love this story and it is beautifully told. Events are strange but beautiful. This is a story about retaining the beauty in life - living in such a way that you are no longer "imprisoned in the commonplace." This book will make you think and maybe help you to see life in a more positive way.

Rating: 4.5