It’s difficult to know where to start with this book. G K Chesterton’s 1908 novel is subtitled “a nightmare” and certainly resembles a dream rather than a conventional, realistic novel. After all, it starts with a sunset and ends with the dawn. This tale of an undercover policeman investigating an organisation of bomb-throwing anarchists has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written at around the same time, but Chesterton treats the same theme completely differently.
The members of the Central Anarchist Council are known by the days of the week, and Gabriel Syme, a poet who is in reality a policeman, manages to get himself elected to this body as “Thursday”. The president of the council is the sinister and grotesque “Sunday”, but who is he really?
The story proceeds by a succession of surreal and bizarre incidents, such as hidden rooms, chases, and confrontations to a conclusion that reveals some sort of logic was operating all along. It anticipates Kafka, whose writing career was to start some years later; perhaps of British authors of the time, it is closest to H G Wells.
Just what sort of book is it? A thriller? It’s quite short and very fast paced. Plainly, some sort of allegory is intended, but whether political, philosophical or religious, or a mixture of all three is hard to say. A lot of people have expended a lot of effort over many years to work out just what Chesterton might have meant by it all.
Chesterton was a poet as well as a writer of prose, and initially trained as an artist. It is not surprising that one of the great strengths of this book is the visual quality of the descriptive prose. The images are so striking that they lodge in one’s memory. This is particularly the case in the scenes set in London. The red-brick suburb of Saffron Park in the sunset and the relentless chase through the city streets in the falling snow are unforgettable. The effect is almost psychedelic and rather like an episode of a late-1960s TV show.
He also makes considerable use of the idea originated by Poe that the best way to keep something hidden is to leave it in plain sight.
Chesterton is best known today as the author of the Father Brown stories. His catholic priest detective is something of a riposte to Sherlock Holmes, solving crimes by intuition and knowledge of human nature, rather than logical deduction. Given that he was also a notable Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1922, it seems sensible to concentrate on the religious interpretation of The Man Who Was Thursday.
It is a peculiarly enjoyable book; the experience of reading it is quite cheering. Just when you think you know what might be going on, Chesterton throws in another twist that makes you question what has just happened. That may be why it has stayed in print, despite the difficulty of interpreting it. If you are new to the writing of G K Chesterton, though, I would recommend that you start with Father Brown, before tackling this one.
The Good Reader 