The Club of Queer Trades Review

The Club of Queer Trades Review

The club of queer trades is a little known book by the influential, but relatively unimportant (in this day and age) author of essays, poetry and fiction, G K Chesterton. It is a small novella, and isn't one of his major works, but it perhaps should be.

Previous to this work I have only read the author's philosophical work Orthodoxy, which I found to be a rather intriguing view on Christianity and life on the whole. It really does deserve a reread, and I plan to purchase a copy of the work sometime soon.

As I see it G K Chesterton seems interested in destroying facts, or at least he (paradoxically) favours intuition, or fantasy over facts. He wrote rather famously, in Orthodoxy, a strange and interesting thing:

I am concerned with a
certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the
fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

In the Novella, The club of queer trades, the character Basil Grant, former judge who went mad in the middle of a court case, embodies this theology of Chesterton's in many ways. He is a interesting character, and works solutions upon impulse and seemingly unjustified judgments in spite of the presumed facts, and he, his brother and the narrator are involved in many strange cases of mystery, all of which are connected to the strange Club of Queer Trades.

The club is exclusive and seems to caricature the post-industrial revolution's upper class of spending their time involved in secret societies and clubs for lack of better things to do, but does so in a soft light. There is also a clear mocking of the modern spirit of the times in which the book was written, that being 1905. The club of queer trades is restricted to people who work in an area never before worked in, something totally new and unheard of, and the income of this occupation provides their full income. It must be something specifically new, not a variation of an existing trade. A few of the trades are explored in the novel, such as actors who detain people from dinner parties with wild stories, or organizers of adventures for the bored rich, this agency called the Adventure and Romance Agency, which creates a mystery around the customer who must solve it, involving many suspenseful and often violent circumstances.
For these inventive and fun adventures the novella is worth the read, but it is more than that also. It is a study of the upper class society of the time, and the way the lower class is paid to provide them entertainment and excitement. It is not a Marxist statement. It is a statement, though.

Check out these blogs if you're interested:

http://thewardrobeandthewhitetree.blogspot.com/2006/02/chesterton-goodies.html

http://chestertonandfriends.blogspot.com/

Also if you want to read this book on PDF you can, just download it here:
http://manybooks.net/titles/chestertetext99tcoqt10.html