Product Description

G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7888 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-09
• Released on: 2001-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."

But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.

Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried

Review
"A powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each of us encounters in his single-handed struggle with the universe."
--C. S. Lewis -- Review

Review
"A powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each of us encounters in his single-handed struggle with the universe."
--C. S. Lewis

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Customer Reviews

Sparkling prose littered with gems
To this point in my life, I've now read three works by Chesterton: his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse and his biography of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The Man Who Was Thursday is a completely different work from the abovementioned pair. It is subtitled "A Nightmare" and that's exactly how it reads.

Thursday starts out like a quirky spy/detective novel, but as the plot progresses, it becomes obvious that this is no typical pot-boiler. It is well to keep in mind when reading this book that Chesterton was a master of paradox--and Thursday is riddled with paradoxes. Indeed, the whole book is a paradox to some extent. In an interview recorded in a biography by Maisie Ward, Chesterton once summarized Thursday by saying: "In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks reveal benevolence."

To summarize what happens in Thursday is to give away much of what makes this book an enjoyable read, so I will refrain. But the plot is almost coincidental to what makes this book interesting. It is a mere plastic tree (if an oddly shaped one) upon which Chesterton hangs a myriad of literary ornaments. The book is simply littered with gems which sparkle even out of context. Here are two of my favorites:

"We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals....We say that the most dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral people."

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."

The Man Who Was Thursday can be read and appreciated on two different levels--as an entertaining bit of absurdity that, in some sections, prefigures a Monty Python routine, or as an allegory with significant theological depth. I enjoyed it a great deal on both levels.

To conclude, let me simply say that this is the kind of book that I will need to re-read at some future point, perhaps a couple times, to make sure I didn't miss anything. Fortunately, Chesterton's prose is so merry and brisk that the re-read will be a pleasure rather than a trial. However, if you are the type of reader who demands significant character development, a standard plotline, and is offended by Christian spiritual content, I'd forget about this one. It's not the book for you.

Early terrorism thriller
Today it's al Qaeda... in Chesterton's time it was anarchists, ("no government is good government," sort of early-period extremist Libertarians).

But here Chesterton spun a fascinating tale of a policeman who goes under-cover to foil a bomb plot. The seven anarchists involved use day-of-the-week code names; thus, our policeman becomes "Thursday".

As you approach the end of this fine work you might ask yourself, "Where the heck is this thing going?" But just hang in there -- it makes total sense when all is revealed.

While I don't consider this work a real genuine page-turner, it did manage to maintain my interest. For me, this is Chesterton's Magnum opus.

I highly recommend this 1908 book to anyone who is interested in thrillers, mysteries, and/or British literature.

Vapid and more than a little pretentious
Most people find themselves unable to clearly express their ideas not because those ideas are brilliant, but because they are jumbled. I think Chesterton belongs to this latter sort. The book contains few original thoughts, although it does retell some basic philosophical problems semi-competently. That's about all there is to it--and, well, the prose is good. The action is vague and hackneyed--like a hollywood blockbuster. The characters are stilted, lifeless and asexual. One has to smoke a lot of good pot or watch a lot of bad movies beforehand if one wishes to find this stuff impressive.