Chesterton, GK - The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

In the style of some of Chesterton’s writings, this is not a story (or even a novel), owing to a fundamental lack of plot. Instead, it is principally a series of descriptions in highly poetic language, accompanied by flowery prose, all of which ask questions about the nature of God, man, war, the city and humour. As usual, there is an emphasis on colour, shape and light; also philosophy. Chesterton can be compared to Sterne and Borges (who also wrote some very Chestertonian short stories). In short, too odd to be entertaining; Father Brown is preferred.

It took me a long while to work out why I felt so cheated by the ending of this book, but at last I started looking at and thinking about real water tanks, and it gradually came to me. The hero forces the attacking forces to surrender by threatening to blow up a municipal water tank and 'flood the streets', and the opposing leader meekly gives in. But let's do the maths. The Campden Hill Reservoir contained 3.5 million gallons, or about 13 million litres. This is about five Olympic swimming pools' worth. One narrow street might be, say, fifty metres long and eight metres across - an area of four million square centimetres. One litre is a thousand cubic centimetres. Dumping all that water in one street AT ONCE would fill it to a depth of about 3 metres.

But firstly, the water would not and could not be all released at once; it would take a considerable time to stream out of any opening in the reservoir - and no mention is made of explosives or other means to force a large breach. I don't have the physics to work out the details, but it is unlikely that the reservoir would be designed to empty in less than, say, a hour - what would be the point? - so the maximum flow would probably be about 4000 litres a second.

Secondly, once the water had spread out to, say, ten streets, the maximum water level would be only 0.3 metres - damaging to carpets but hardly to people, particularly as it spread out into the houses and open land and went down the drains. In other words, a few streets would suffer structural damage and some would get flooded. So what, in a war?

Rereading the book made me consider an alternative theory: that the threat was against the army in the streets rather than the streets themselves. But this is also untenable. The size of the attaching army is given as four thousand men - somewhat less than the number of people in a large theatre. If a theatre can be evacuated in ten minutes then a trained army could certainly evacuate the area around a reservoir in ten minutes. Remember, they don't have to get far away - just out of the first few streets and up a hill or into a building.

So my conclusion is that the surrender is nonsense, and Buck is talking through his hat. And all the commentators who have praised this book but missed its fundamental implausibility must be as innumerate as the author.

Jon.