Flying Inn

The Flying Inn by GK Chesterton, 320 pages

First published in 1914, The Flying Inn takes place in an England where a combination of a moralistic progressivism and an Islamic fad have resulted in the closing of every public house in England.  A renegade pub owner and an Irish rebel take to the road with a barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese to satisfy a thirsty nation.

The conceit allows Chesterton to exercise both his poetic whimsy and satiric bite.  The novel is peppered with drinking songs celebrating the traditional joys of life, while the plot skewers politicians, socialists, capitalists, journalists, aesthetes, and religious enthusiasts.  As with most of Chesterton's fiction, the plot is vanishingly thin, little more than an excuse to bring his sane protagonists into contact with the wider world in all its insanity.