The Flying Inn [Paperback]

G. K. Chesterton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2001

Armed with a donkey cart filled with rum, cheese and a tavern signpost, pub owner Humphrey Hump and a companion take to the road in this rollicking, madcap adventure, extending good cheer to a cast of memorable characters. A hilarious, satirical romp in which Chesterton inveighs against Prohibition, vegetarianism, theosophy, and other oppressive forms of modernity.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; Dover ed edition (December 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 048641910X
• ISBN-13: 978-0486419107
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,458,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lust for Life, Political Incorrectness, and God, May 7, 2003

By 

David Rolfe (Pasadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flying Inn (Paperback)

G. K. Chesterton is a hugely powerful voice, both intellectually and spiritually. I resonate to him as I do to few others (a few examples of my personal favorites, going in different directions, would be Leo Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, James Branch Cabell). "The Flying Inn", published in England in 1914, is a tale of a man who is confronted by modern cultural trends -- and, oddly enough, this focus on all things "modern" (in 1914) is no less relevant today than it was a hundred years ago. Chesterton saw England as being a culture in transition and in conflict with itself, and the struggles he saw play out dramatically in this novel: The individual versus the collective; common sense versus political correctness; right and wrong versus legal and illegal; a healthy soul versus a healthy body. But to state these themes makes the book sound like a lecture, and it's not that (although it does freely meander into occasional philosophical discourses, some of which didn't hold my interest); this story is, more than anything else, an adventure and an odyssey, which begins when Mr. Humphrey Pump wants to visit the local pub in pursuit of a pleasant hour, but he finds it is being shut down by lawmakers who have decreed the neighborhood bar to be an unhealthy anachronism. Thus begins a tale of flight and civil disobedience (hence the title, "The Flying Inn"). We meet a curious collection of characters that are driving, hindering, observing, and contemplating this safe, regulated, soulless, terrifying world of the near future.

The descriptions of multicultural mandates are prescient. For example, one of the major characters, an English lawmaker, is enamored with Islam, and he becomes an agent of social progress, having decided it's necessary to make England less offensive to its Muslim friends -- thus England is to be purged of pubs, not to mention, for example, ending the offensive Christian habit of marking ballots with a cross (they should be marked instead with a crescent). A lot of the details of this enlightened "tolerance" ring disturbingly true when juxtaposed against the excesses of the present day.

Like "Gulliver's Travels", "The Flying Inn" is both a serious social comment and a lot of fun. There's a reason it's still in print after all these years.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comic and Tragic Masterpiece, July 14, 2006

By 

Arthem "arthem" (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Flying Inn (Paperback)

The Flying Inn defied many of my expectations of the book, but is imbued with Chesteron and his many unique prophetic touches. Throughout, the story is a meandering dash of unlikely heroes, pitted against all the forces of "modern" society. In this respect, the book is a clear precursor to CS Lewis' "That Hideous Strength", and bears a great deal of similarity to Chesterton's "The Ball & The Cross". From the standpoint of the characters and the plot, "The Flying Inn" is hilarious. I read it on the airplane and caught myself laughing out loud.

But then there is the tragic component of the story, which is that the prophetic vein has proven all too true. Certainly the west never embraced and incorporated Islam to the extent that Chesterton portrays - the temperance movement is quiescent for the moment, and although everything from fast food to meat is under assault from the nanny state, the attack doesn't bear the hallmarks of a crypto-islamic ethic.

But, Chesterton accurately portrays the weakness of the West as it abandons its underlying moral strength as it abandons Christianity, leaving it at the mercy of societies in which self-hatred and tolerance are not treated as virtues. There is a strong Chesterbelloc tone to the book - Hillaire Belloc's catalog of the enemies of the Church are well represented. Indeed, "The Flying Inn" demonstrates Chesteron's gift at immortalizing concepts, where Belloc's more lucid expositions are dated and flat.

Where Chesteron's "The Ball & The Cross" illustrates a dystopia of modernism and apathy, "The Flying Inn" illustrates a dystopia of oligarchic cultural relativism. And it is just such an assault that has rendered the West so vulnerable to the current assault by Islam - an assault not by violence and conquest (despite the activities of terrorists), but an assault of belief and energy. Muslim immigration has transformed Europe, and outside of England and Poland, there is little resistance left in the weak old secular dominions. Chesterton's world is coming to pass - the green banners of "the prophet" fly ever more freely in Europe.

And yet, despite the enormity of both the portrayal and realization of the death of a great civilization, Chesterton's romping tale leaves you hopeful and cheerful. Ultimately, Merrie England and its children will have the final laugh - precisely because we CAN laugh, and our enemies cannot.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superlative, April 18, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Flying Inn (Paperback)

The Flying Inn is a delightful treasury of wit, poetry, and commentary, wrapped together in a story written in the positive spirit of early 20th-century adventure books. Some of the specifics might at first appear to be dated, but the theme is more relevant than ever.