Tales for Our Time is a unique feature of The Mark Steyn Club - and, I'm pleased to say, one of our most popular: our nightly audio serialisations of classic literature from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, via some neglected but highly pertinent gems such as Conan Doyle's tale of proto-jihadists preying on foolish westerners, The Tragedy of the Korosko.
Our current caper is The Flying Inn by G K Chesterton, a remarkably prescient novel that posits an England in which the elites make common cause with Islam. "And your point is?" as Sir Keir Starmer would say. Last night we discussed the late Victorian/Edwardian fad among paternalist business titans for "model villages", most of which are still pretty agreeable. Bart Nielsen, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
My beautiful bride grew up in Wallasey, an easy bicycle ride from Port Sunlight [see top right], so we have been there several times. Bournville also, though that is much more of an outing. Very nice.
I am more used to the company towns of the Wisconsin Northwoods that the lumber barons erected. Some were done very nicely, like Laona. Some have been long abandoned. None have fared well as the Blob has drained the hinterlands of meaningful employment in agriculture and forestry.
Indeed, Bart. On the other hand, in Part Twenty-One of The Flying Inn, we meet the genius behind the not-so-model village of Peaceways - a Teuton of pronounced views:
He came across the institution called Death, and began to argue with it. Not seeing any rational explanation of this custom of dying, so prevalent among his fellow-citizens, he concluded that it was merely traditional (which he thought meant "effete"), and began to think of nothing but ways of evading or delaying it. This had a rather narrowing effect on him, and he lost much of that acrid ardour which had humanised the atheism of his youth, when he would almost have committed suicide for the pleasure of taunting God with not being there.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-One of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
I'll be right back here tomorrow with Part Twenty-Two of The Flying Inn. If you're minded to join us in The Mark Steyn Club in this our eighth season, you're more than welcome. You can find more information here. And, if you have a chum you think might enjoy Tales for Our Time (so far, we've covered H G Wells, P G Wodehouse, Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Kafka, Gogol, Baroness Orczy, Victor Hugo, Louisa May Alcott, O Henry, John Buchan, Scott Fitzgerald and more), we have a special Gift Membership.
