The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton

Too ridiculous to succeed on any of its many levels

The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel by English author G. K. Chesterton, was published in 1908. In the (fictional) London suburb of Saffron Park, two would-be anarchist poets, Gregory and Syme, engage in a snarky debate about anarchy and poetry, in which they essentially accuse each other of being posers. Gregory reveals that he is indeed a true anarchist, and he invites Syme to a meeting of his underground terrorist cell, complete with a basement full of bombs. Syme, in turn, reveals that he is an undercover police detective from Scotland Yard assigned to a special counterterrorist task force designed to thwart the anarchists’ nefarious schemes. As the meeting proceeds, Syme meets the high council of this anarchist ring. Its seven members bear code names drawn from the days of the week: Sunday, Monday, Thursday, etc—hence the title.

Gregory and Syme, the anarchist and the detective, give each other their “word” that they won’t blow the other’s cover or turn the other in to their respective organizations. This is one of those absurd plot twists that Victorian British authors like to work into their stories in order to show off how clever they are and because they’re obsessed with what constitutes a “gentleman.” In reality, an anarchist, in dealing with a mortal enemy, would not consider himself bound by some conventional moral code, and a detective, hopefully, would take the possible loss of thousands of lives more seriously than any adherence to some “gentlemen’s agreement.”

This early plot element is just the start of many instances of ostentatious cleverness that remove the narrative from any semblance of reality. Some scenes in the book are clearly meant to be comical, but overall I’m pretty sure Chesterton intended this to be a suspenseful thriller. Though the novel is subtitled “A Nightmare,” however, it’s so far removed from realism that one can’t take it seriously enough to feel any fear, shock, or thrills from it. In the final two chapters of the book, Chesterton goes in an entirely different direction, abandoning the detective story altogether in favor of a more surreal scenario that seems intended to be profound. There are obvious allusions to God, Satan, Christ, and other Christian imagery, but how it all fits together is a puzzle to me. I don’t feel too bad about not knowing what’s going on, however, because the characters in the novel never know what’s going on either. Something else to note is that there really are no female characters in this book because women apparently don’t factor into Chesterton’s grand Christian-English-gentleman view of the universe.

In summation, The Man Who Was Thursday ostensibly begins as a mystery/thriller about terrorism, but it fails to deliver any thrills. For a while, it ventures into comedy (intentionally or not), but then it ultimately results in some kind of allegory of religious mysticism. It’s quite possible I’m just too lazy to figure this book out, but then again I have little desire to do so when I know the answer is just going to be some Christian sermon. If that’s what Chesterton wants to write about, he shouldn’t dress it up as a detective story. Some literary authorities—Kingsley Amis, Jorge Luis Borges, Michael Dirda—praised this book to high heaven, but I really ended up hating it. It’s just a pretentious and pointless waste of time.