Tales of the Long Bow by British author G. K. Chesterton is a collection of short stories first published in 1925.
‘The place was a straight suburban road of strictly-fenced suburban houses on the outskirts of a modern town. The time was about twenty minutes to eleven on Sunday morning, when a procession of suburban families in their Sunday clothes were passing decorously up the road to church. And the man was a very respectable retired military man named Colonel Crane, who was also going to church, as he had done every Sunday at the same hour for a long stretch of years. There was no obvious difference between him and his neighbours, except that he was a little less obvious.’
“These tales concern the doing of things recognised as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about.” So begins the first of the eight selections in the novel. The individuals who form the League of the Long Bow are men with a mission. As they see it, they are defending the land, and the individual soul, against wealth, preposterous regulations, politically corrupt schemes, and faddish concepts. In the course of this very serious work, a man eats his hat, silk purses are made from sow's ears, the Thames is set on fire, and pigs fly.
Both satire and cautionary tale, these stories are remarkable for their wit, humour, and sense of wonder. While they were all originally published separately, they are woven together naturally, clearly, and deliberately, to present a unified yet brilliantly understated motif by this extraordinary author.
