Hilaire Belloc: "The Four Men" - one of my favourite books.

This has just been republished and is available from Amazon, so I contributed this review (of which I'm quite proud) to the site:

 You need to come to this book with an open mind. It is not "Cautionary Verses". Unless you are well-read in Belloc's work it will be a surprise to you. It is, ostensibly, an account of a walk through the County of Sussex at the very beginning of the 20th Century. Four men meet by chance at the border between Kent and Sussex and agree to travel west together on foot, telling each other stories as they progress. It is still possible to follow the route they take (although the M23 gets in the way) and the area around Tilgate and "The Troll's Hut" is probably the most changed. So you might suppose this is a travel book with historical interest; partly this is so. But, like most of Belloc's books - and he published scores in his lifetime - "The Four Men" is a vehicle for Belloc's opinions on many different topics. Wealth and greed, first love, the nature of friendship, Public Houses and Inns, poetry, drinking, ageing - the list could go on for a very long time.

A digression: you may have heard it said that Belloc was very right-wing; you may have read that he was anti-semitic; but you need to bear two things in mind. This book was written before the First World War, and some of the attitudes have dated - but not as much, say, as those which T S Eliot exhibited in many of his poems. And the second thing to remember is that, with G K Chesterton, Belloc proposed the political theory of Distributism; this proposed that every family should have the means of maintaining itself ("Three Acres And A Cow") and that land ownership should be taken from the rich and handed to the common people in fair and equal shares. And in many respects you could argue that Belloc had more in common with William Morris, or with the Hippies of the late 1960s, than with any Conservative philosopher. Indeed, he was a liberal MP for a short time - until he decided that politics was a corrupt game.

This is one of my favourite books; I re-read it often. It is more accessible than "The Cruise of The Nona" or "The Path to Rome", and although there are quasi-mystical tropes there are also passages of pure comedy, and of pathos. If some of the writing is vaguely reminiscent of Conrad, some of it is quite close to Jerome K Jerome.

It becomes apparent as you read that this book is a meditation on the twin themes of ageing (which comes to us all) and on the interplay between the person and a much-loved place or landscape (which some of us are unlucky enough not to experience). It also becomes apparent that each of the Four Men are facets of Belloc's own personality. I have an original copy of the edition reproduced in this repint, and can thoroughly recommend it as a thing of style and beauty. Give old Hilaire a chance - I don't think you'll be disappointed.