The unsavoury attitudes found in novels from writers such as GK Chesterton and Susan Coolidge have ruined some of the fiction I loved most as a child. But where do you draw the line when you return to tainted classics?When I was 10 or 11,I was consumed by a passion for Golden Age detective fiction. I browsed mildew-smelling secondhand bookshops for Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle, developing secret proto-crushes on both Lord Peter Wimsey and Sherlock Holmes (and wishing I could carry off a monocle). I burned through Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books, and Agatha Christies by the score and I adored GK Chesterton’s Father Brown.
But recently,rereading the stories of the round-faced, stumpy cleric, and with his flapping black cassock and his encyclopedic knowledge of human evil,left me feeling cold rather than cosy. Chesterton’s glorious evocations of light, landscape, or unnerving,lurid (shocking; sensational) strangeness remain compelling. But his frequent use of racial stereotypes now slams me repeatedly out of his text. References to “the yellow man”, “a sizable white bulk … but with the needless emphasis of a black face”, or “the fashionable negro … showing his apish teeth” – even the intrinsic evil of a “Turkey carpet – leave me feeling that the padre’s much-touted wide-mindedness boils down all too often to mere distrust of any skin-shade other than white.
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Source: theguardian.com