At the turn of the 1900s, anarchy was a political fad every bit as powerful as global warming is today. More locally destructive, anarchists murdered several heads of state (ranging from President McKinley to the Archduke Ferdinand), and numerous public servants. They also fueled the statist revolutions of the communist era. European nations vastly increased their power by developing their secret police in response to the public panic created by these lunatic figures.

G. K. Chesterton, the great Catholic man of letters, writes one of the most startlingly original novels of the 20th-century in response both to the original source of anarchism (the imitation of Satan’s non serviam) and to the faithless response of modern man to such a threat. In the process Chesterton delineates, beautifully and entertainingly, the way that the very God who created and sustains order is so far beyond order (as puny human minds comprehend it) that He appears wild, chaotic and even threatening to our stubborn desire to reduce the cosmos to our control. Thus, even as he defends the need of a conservative and humane order, Chesterton is the poet of a God wildly beyond our most soaring imaginations.