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.