G. K. Chesterton wrote The Flying Inn in 1914, a farce about a future England whose reformers make peace with a fashionable, “progressive” Islam and then tidy the country to match: inns first, the rest to follow.
On the book’s hundredth anniversary I tried to make an audiobook of it. It was a labour of love.
The novel is long out of copyright. Project Gutenberg has a free text.
I started recording in 2014. The job was larger than I expected, and life got in the way after Chapter 9. By then the argument of the book is already on the table.
In my defence for giving up, Chesterton crowds the stage, and I tried a different voice for each character without keeping notes. He also seeds the story with songs, which meant inventing tunes and singing them. That alone turned a reading into a production.
Chapter 1 is the little lecturer on the Pebblewick beach, proving English inns were Islamic all along by the names on the signs. It is Chesterton’s comic way of demonstrating Islamic sophistry at full tilt. Here Chesterton uses the same kind of temporal relativism that we hear from islam constantly. In chapter 1, the Muslim claims that streets named as crescents, and inns or pubs called the Elephant are proof that England was authentically and originally Islamic. The same dawa preaching you hear about Jesus and Moses and how all people are born Muslim etc.
Chapter 2 is the peace conference. Lord Ivywood, the English spokesman, will not disturb “the homes, the marriages, the family arrangements” of the Ottoman settlement, including girls taken to harems after the fall of Pylos. He will not even ask about consent. The only man who puts a hand on his sword is the Irishman, Patrick Dalroy. After he tears up the olive trees he says: “Now I will go. I have seen something today that is worse than death: and the name of it is Peace.” That is the conference in one line: surrender spoken as virtue.
No one should feel obliged to listen. This was a personal project. If people like it, I may put up the next six chapters. Complete readings exist online, and the book itself is free.
I should add that I had lost all these files to failing hard drives, and then I remembered that I had sent them as I had done them to Gates of Vienna’s Dymphna, who really enjoyed them. So I beseeched The Baron to please look for them and re send them back to me, which he was able to do. Otherwise they would have been lost in perpetuity.
