THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY - Book review

G K Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, subtitled ‘A Nightmare’ was published in 1908. It’s a strange beast, part thriller and part ‘melodramatic moonshine’ as Chesterton called it shortly before he died in 1936. It’s amusing and frustrating and is known to have influenced a number of authors.

Poets Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory squabble about the relevance of poetry and the prevailing scourge of anarchism – perhaps influenced by Conrad’s The Secret Agent published a year earlier.

Gregory takes Syme to a secret underground meeting place of anarchists. Here they meet five members of the London branch of the Central Council of New Anarchists – each member is given a codename of a day of the week. There is a vacancy for Thursday: ‘he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow’ (p31). Gregory is hoping to be elected as Thursday; however, Syme is appointed instead. The President of the Council is not present; he is called Sunday. Each individual is distinctive with often amusing descriptions.

The attendees are unaware that Syme has been recruited to the New Detective Corps ‘for the frustration of the great conspiracy [anarchy]’ and given a small blue card on which was written ‘The Last Crusade’ (p49).

For much of the book there lingers an air of sinister mystery. ‘The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight’ (p49). Sometime later Syme – now Thursday – is to meet the President. ‘Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the headquarters of hell’ (p56).

Friday – a very old man, Professor de Worms, was decrepit – ‘in the last dissolution of senile decay (p59). ‘Another hateful fancy crossed Syme’s quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off’ (p60).

Chesterton has a good descriptive style, and employs telling phrases from time to time. ‘His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision’ (p63). ‘Most of the snow was melted or trampled to mud, but here and there a clot of it still showed grey rather than white in the gloom. The small streets were sloppy and full of pools, which reflected the flaming lamps irregularly, and by accident, like fragments of some other and fallen world’ (p87).

‘The sun on the grass was dry and hot. So in plunging into the wood they had a cool shock of shadow, as of divers who plunge into a dim pool. The inside of the wood was full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows. They made a sort of shuddering veil, almost recalling the dizziness of a cinematograph... this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the daylight outside) seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days...’ (p116/117) Indeed, a Kafkaesque world.

Syme is determined to prevent an anarchist outrage on the Continent and thus is pitted against other members of the Council of Seven Days. This is the best part, the thrill of the chase. There are several twists (which become somewhat laboured and silly) and then there is the ending – an ending signposted by the subtitle, an ending all tyro writers are warned to avoid.

This arguably surreal book has been widely praised – Kingsley Amis said he read it every year – and is categorised as fantasy in more than one respected fantasy encyclopaedia.

Shuttlecock - book review

I’ve come late to Graham Swift’s 1981 novel Shuttlecock. I’d bought it on paperback release when I was studying psychology with the Open University, as it was labelled ‘a psychological thriller’; but I never got round to reading it then.

 

The book is narrated in the first person by Prentiss who works as a senior clerk in the ‘dead crimes’ department of the police archives.

There’s a Kafkaesque tone to it, a dreamlike quality that lingers even after the last page is turned.

We’re not exactly sure of the narrator’s reliability regarding his observations and conclusions.

His boss is Quinn, who remains aloof and has a tendency to psychologically and verbally bully the office staff. Then Prentiss begins to realise that some files once requested by Quinn are never returned, while others are tampered with.

Prentiss is a bit of a bully himself, domineering towards his wife and hypercritical of his two sons, Martin and Peter. It is possible that this is relevant to his childhood. He makes twice weekly visits to his father in a mental institution, following the old man’s breakdown. Prentiss is obsessed about his father’s wartime memoir, Shuttlecock, about his spying exploits in France for SOE and his subsequent capture and torture. Gradually, Prentiss questions his father’s alleged bravery, perhaps recognising that he himself is a coward. But he finally plucks up the courage to confront Quinn about the missing files.

The narrative is riveting, despite the unappealing nature of Prentiss, and offers insightful parallels about father and son relationships. It is not all grim; there is humour to be found, notably his references to his sexual antics with his wife Marian, though nothing graphic. An editor might have pointed out the possible reader confusion of using two female character names beginning with the same letter, Marian (his wife with pert breasts) and Maureen (she with big breasts from the typing pool), but that’s of no real consequence. 

This is not a thriller, but that dubious description is no fault of Swift but rather the publisher. Certainly it is suspenseful and continually intriguing with countless behavioural observations.