Courtesy of newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."