The Man Who Was Thursday
by G. K. Chesterton
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Book Summary Information
Author: G. K. ChestertonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-09-22
ISBN: 1449529720
Number of pages: 100
Publisher: CreateSpace
Book Reviews of The Man Who Was Thursday
Book Review: G K Chesterton's Masterpiece in the Realm of Fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
Many consider "The Man Who Was Thursday" to be G. K. Chesterton's masterpiece in the realm of fiction. The story of detective Gabriel Syme's struggle against the Supreme Council of bomb-throwing anarchists begins much like Chesterton's popular Father Brown short stories about a Roman Catholic priest who also solves murders. However, Thursday quickly crosses the borders of Father Brown and Sherlock Holmes and enters the world of Kafka's Metamorphisis. What begins solidly in the world of detective fiction ends mystically in the world of the surreal. The story of one detective fighting six anarchists quickly changes into the story of six philosophers chasing one man, whose name is Sunday.
The novel begins as a detective story. The hero, Gabriel Syme, is a member of a special anti-anarchist police force lead by a mysterious commander who only takes appointments in a pitch dark room. By tricking the rash anarchist poet Lucian Gregory, Syme infiltrates the Supreme Council, led by the universally feared and physically huge Sunday. The members of the council all have code names corresponding to the days of the week, and Syme takes the seat of the recently deceased Thursday. The plot thickens when Syme discovers that the men he originally thought were his arch enemies are all comrades from his own task force. The bewildered detectives return to Sunday to demand answers, and then things get really weird. Chesterton was never very secretive about what the ending of the novel meant, or who Sunday really is, but then, that is a mystery which will best be unlocked when you read the book! The Man Who Was Thursday
Summary of The Man Who Was Thursday
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a novel by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1908. The book is sometimes referred to as a metaphysical thriller. In Edwardian era London, Gabriel Syme is recruited at Scotland Yard to a secret anti-anarchist police corps. Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet, lives in the suburb of Saffron Park. Syme meets him at a party and they debate the meaning of poetry. Gregory argues that revolt is the basis of poetry. Syme demurs, insisting that the essence of poetry is not revolution, but rather law. He antagonizes Gregory by asserting that the most poetical of human creations is the timetable for the London Underground. He suggests that Gregory isn't really serious about his anarchism. This so irritates Gregory that he takes Syme to an underground anarchist meeting place, revealing that his public endorsement of anarchy is a ruse to make him seem harmless, when in fact he is an influential member of the local chapter of the European anarchist council. The central council consists of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a code name, and the position of Thursday is about to be elected by Gregory's local chapter. Gregory expects to win the election, but just before the election Syme reveals to Gregory after an oath of secrecy that he is a secret policeman. Fearful Syme may use his speech in evidence of a prosecution, Gregory's weakened words fail to convince the local chapter that he is sufficiently dangerous for the job. Syme makes a rousing anarchist speech and wins the vote. He is sent immediately as the chapter's delegate to the central council. In his efforts to thwart the council's intentions, however, Syme discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives; each was employed just as mysteriously and assigned to defeat the Council. They all soon find out that they were fighting each other and not real anarchists; such was the mastermind plan of their president Sunday. In a surreal conclusion, Sunday himself is unmasked as only seeming to be terrible; in fact, he is a force of good like the detectives. However, he is unable to give an answer to the question of why he caused so much trouble and pain for the detectives. Gregory, the only real anarchist, seems to challenge the good council. His accusation is that they, as rulers, have never suffered like Gregory and their other subjects, and so their power is illegitimate. However, Syme is able to refute this accusation immediately because of the terrors inflicted by Sunday on the rest of the council. The dream ends when Sunday himself is asked if he has ever suffered. His last words, "can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?", is the question that Jesus asks St. James and St. John in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 10, vs 38-39, to challenge their commitment in becoming his disciples. Like most of Chesterton's fiction, the story includes some Christian allegory. Chesterton, a Christian by this time (he joined the Roman Catholic Church about 15 years later), suffered from a brief bout of depression during his college days, and claimed afterwards that he wrote this book as an unusual affirmation that goodness and right were at the heart of every aspect of the world. The costumes that the detectives don towards the end of the book represent what was created on their respective day. Sunday, "the sabbath" and "the peace of God", sits upon a throne in front of them. The name of the girl Syme likes, Rosamond, is derived from "Rosa Mundi", meaning "Rose of the World" in Latin, and a title given to Christ. The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican politician Michael Collins with the idea "if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out."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
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