The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

Yes, the plot is predictable. But the scenes near the end are so dramatic and dream-like that I feel Sunday could easily slip into The Master and Margarita. Well worth reading for the imagery.

highly amusing & thot provoking ( )

The author's vivid descriptions of scenery and settings, as well as certain philosophy, make for memorable reading.

The plot moves along with intriguing mystery and excitement, then becomes redundant and thoroughly improbable, but worse, boring. ( )

A clever reader will figure out this shaggy dog tale by the second reveal (of six), but it's still fun to see how Chesterton lines everything up. ( )

A compelling short read written with plenty of wit, G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday takes the ever-popular detective genre and turns it into, as the book's subtitle suggests, a surrealist nightmare", like a cross between the Sherlock Holmes books and Alice in Wonderland. The writer Kingsley Amis praised Thursday for its "brilliantly original blending of relatively straightforward cloak-and-dagger elements with the metaphysical", and this indeed does accurately describe the book. I found the mystery to be particularly good; we turn the page wanting – needing – to know what happens next. What is this conspiracy? Who is part of it and who is not? Who or what is "Sunday"? Chesterton clearly relishes the absurdity of the genre and the surreal licence it affords him; for example, when devising a new secret code based on sign language, the character Gabriel Syme insists – positively insists – on developing codes for his favourite words: 'coeval' and 'lush' (pg. 86). There's a lot of – quite literally – cloak-and-dagger stuff: meetings in dark alleys, following sinister marks down moonlit streets, nervous spies fingering the loaded revolvers hidden in their coat pockets. It's all ripping stuff. And gripping.

However, as Robert Giddings notes in the Afterword to my Atlantic Crime Classics edition, "beneath the voluble fizz" – such a great phrase – "there's a seriousness in Chesterton's thought and vision." (pg. 177). And this, sadly, is where The Man Who Was Thursday falters a bit. You see, Chesterton – who, without fail, is always described in any piece of writing as the "Christian apologist" – has an underlying theological current running throughout the novel. The seven members of the anarchist council, including codename "Thursday" and the mysterious "Sunday", are based on the seven days in which God purportedly made the earth. Particularly towards the end, where Chesterton's theological musings become a bit more explicit, we are confronted with such convoluted reasonings and ideas that, whilst probably convincing to a turn-of-the-century Catholic, seem rather strange nowadays where religion is either absent from discussions amongst people of "reason" or has become dumbed-down by fundamentalists. This stuff is never obstructive for those wanting to engage with the book, and we never get bogged down in a theological swamp, but it does take some of the gloss of an otherwise well-conditioned story.

Because, above all, it is a very good read. Chesterton's prose is very well-written (the final paragraph is particularly evocative) and extremely quotable. The Catholic theology stuff which only comes to a head at the end of the novel means one can only engage with the book's themes after one has read it, not whilst reading it, but you won't care. Because by that time you've just read an amiable and yet gripping, breezy and yet deep, witty and yet weird, little book." ( )