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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Modern Library Classics)
by: G.K. Chesterton

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780375757914
ISBN: 0375757910
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: October 09, 2001
Publisher: Modern Library
Release Date: October 09, 2001
Sales Rank: 2872
Studio: Modern Library

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Editorial Review:

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.

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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- 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 ... Read More

Rating:

- 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.

Rating:

- 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.

Rating:

- Your blue sock is behind the dryer.
I went into reading this book with such strong misconceptions concerning what it was about. Like the characters whom see things completely different it seems like the readers of this book see its meaning quite differently as well. It is a crazy allegory but of what?

On a stylistic level Chesterton's prose is unique and well crafted. Chesterton has his own voice in his writing powerful, artful, and clear. On an abstract level I can't help but feel I got something out of the book but I am at a loss to say what. I was told, long ago, that the book was about the futility of much of what passes for philosophy and the book was a mockery of this in the promotion of faith and traditional religious devotion. I only vaguely got the notion that the book was about this. I could see how the book was about the futility of judging others or creating "us" verse "them" groups because we are all brothers, the ideas and ... Read More

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