For the rest of us, this story is set in an ostensibly future England, in an urban world where all wars have ended and everybody praises the single empire under which they live. The king of England is selected randomly to ensure fairness, and the mantle falls to Auberon Quin, an imaginative prankster. He immediately sets about re-hashing the bureaucracy and its ceremonies into increasing self-parodies, and is delighted when nobody cares about how ridiculous they are being made to act. But from the formal chaos rises Adam Wayne, a young firebrand who is completely incapable of seeing the joke for what it really is. King Auberon has divided London into districts and enforced separate nationalism among each of them, and Adam Wayne decides to take his district, Notting Hill, to war against all the others. Wayne's seemingly insane zeal makes him a fearsome military commander, and as he confounds the rich bureaucrats who try to squash him, this Napoleon and his King are brought ever closer to a confrontation over the nature of what it really means to have human value.
Chesterton, to start at the beginning, is one of the most pompous authors ever to speak the English language. For example, this little number is the first line of the book:
The human race, 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.
Self-renowned (that's right) as the anti-Nietzche, Chesterton filled his non-fiction with more one-liners and pithy pieces of wisdom than Groucho and Karl Marx combined. He was staunchly Roman Catholic and had a talent for analyzing people across cultures, usually erasing the difference between anthropologists and the people they study, or between historians and the past they analyze. However, sometimes he sets aside this talent unfortunately; I have to be skeptical when in The Everlasting Man he asserts that everything worth studying has happened relative to the Mediterranean Sea. And easily the biggest drawback of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that it fails to include even a single woman. Maybe it's a future where men have learned to reproduce asexually and forgotten the feminine thought process. Got any better ideas?
Apart from these concerns, the book is mostly phenomenal. I retain some reservation because there are parts about which I don't have the slightest clue. A large chunk of thought is devoted to humor and the effects of taking something seriously or not. In Chestertonese, this means he's making fun of us, the readers. This is a consolation when you're reading something silly, but not when you find yourself agreeing with a philosophical point only to realize that you've been set up.
Here lies the main piece of brilliance of the novel. In terms of popular culture, Adam Wayne and King Auberon are closest to Batman and the Joker, respectively, but Chesterton did it first. The unstoppable, devoted idealist is going to triumph in the short term, but the prankster has removed all the rules from the game. It's a psychological contest, with each losing on the other's terms, and neither compromises. To top it all off, the two rely on each other: firm belief needs to be taken more seriously than anything else, and humor must have something taken seriously to subvert. So entrenched are Wayne's certitudes that, in a post-apocalyptic scene, the most poignant moment of the book, he is able to acknowledge this co-dependence without being able to let go of it.
This book is tricky to apply to life and literature, but it's worth it. The central theme is how seriously to take things, and as an English major in a liberal arts college, I've seen otherwise intelligent people damn themselves and dam their thoughts by taking this very question too seriously, never noticing the irony. They become parodies of self-awareness. Know that there are things worth involving yourself in, but always be able to put something down or take a step back. That goes for reading, thinking, and analyzing, so that you can go on living.
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