Manalive

A great wind comes roaring up the road and blows an enormous young man over the wall of Beacon House, a dreary London boarding house full of dim, disappointed people. His name is Innocent Smith, and within an hour he has turned the listless household upside down — climbing trees, scattering hats and papers, and setting the lodgers falling in love and remembering that life is worth the trouble after all.

Then two amateur detectives arrive with a dossier of horrors. Smith, they charge, is a burglar, a deserter who abandoned his wife, an attempted murderer who fires pistols at his friends, and a bigamist married all over the world. Half in horror and half in love, the household resolves the matter by holding a mock-trial of its own — an impromptu domestic court that summons witnesses and reads documents to decide whether the man who saved them is a criminal or a saint.

One by one the dreadful charges turn inside out. The burglary was Smith breaking into his own house; the desertion was Smith walking right around the world to arrive again at his own front door and woo his own wife afresh; the murders were pistols fired wide at men who had talked themselves into wanting to die. Every apparent sin proves to be a violent, eccentric affirmation of the very thing it seemed to break.

First published in 1912, Manalive is the comic twin of The Man Who Was Thursday — pure Chestertonian paradox turned to farce. Beneath the laughter runs his great argument: that gratitude is the first of the virtues, that world-weariness is a kind of death, and that the ordinary fact of being alive is the most astonishing thing there is.