The Green Overcoat by Hilaire Belloc

Like many of us, I suspect, the name ‘Hilaire Belloc’ was always associated in my head with characters like Matilda, who lied and burned to death, and Jim, who ran away from his nurse and got eaten by a lion. These spoofs of moralistic stories for children have outlasted the things they were spoofing, and I remember enjoying a cartoon of it as a child. It’s also where most people hear about Arthur Wing Pinero and his very-interesting-play nowadays.

Incidentally, in one group of friends we use ‘belloc’ as shorthand for ‘hilarious’.

Well, nine years ago I bought The Green Overcoat (1912), to find out a bit more about Belloc’s other writing, and now I’ve finally read it. The main character is Professor Higginson, a psychologist described thus:

He was a tall, thin man, exceedingly shy and nervous, with weary, print-worn eyes, which nearly always looked a little pained, and were generally turned uneasily towards the ground. He did not dress carefully. He was not young. He had a trick of keeping both hands in his trouser pockets. He stopped somewhat at the shoulders, and wore a long, grey beard. He was a bachelor, naturally affectionate by disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet were exceedingly large, and his mind nearly always occupied by the subject which he professed.

He is leaving an event when he discovers it is pouring with rain and he hasn’t brought a coat. He decides to borrow another coat on the rack, intending to return it the next day – it is a very distinctive green overcoat, and he doesn’t know its owner. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well, as it turns out, he gets kidnapped! The overcoat had misidentified him.

This is only the beginning of the bizarre chain of events that happen because Professor Higginson borrowed the coat. All of them follow relatively convincingly after the first, only slightly heightening probability. Truth be told, I expected them to be a little more surreal than they are, and there are periods of the novel where Belloc seems almost deliberately to be avoiding the more extreme things that could have happened.

In terms of tone, it’s a comic novel but with a much lighter touch than I’d expected. That is, Higginson’s distress at being kidnapped is real rather than written for laughs – the humour comes from the absurdity of the situation. And Professor Higginson is a likeable main character, having the right mix of nervousness and ultimate determination to make him empathetic. These sorts of things rely on the reader thinking they might have made the same choices, and there is no cruelty at his expense from the novelist, in the way that Waugh does when his affable characters experience misfortune.

Ultimately, I think I’d have liked the novel more if it had been a bit more heightened – closer to Saki, perhaps. As it is, it’s a fun read that doesn’t quite live up to its potential, but good to know more about Belloc than I did before.