It's refreshing to see, in The Man Who Was Thursday, a rare harmony between form and content. G.K. Chesterton's book is a novel about anarchists that is itself a sustained act of anarchy--or, conversely, a novel about the forces of order that winds the watch of its pristine allegories punctually throughout. Or perhaps it's both at once.
Introducing The Man Who Was Thursday
The Man Who Was Thursday is a book caught up in the question of whether it places itself inside or outside of the sphere of its narrative chaos, yet at the same time a book perfectly content to lose itself in that chaos and, borne by the momentum of its own energy, to keep upping the narrative and metaphysical ante until the end--no matter the cost.
The book opens with a debate between Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory--ostensibly two London poets--dealing with the nature and value of anarchy. Gregory, a typically late nineteenth-century, post-Napoleonic, post-Baudelairean Poet of Chaos, asserts that all poets are inherently interested in destruction. Syme, for his part, asserts that the London Railway is the most beautiful poem in the world. It's a good debate: pithy and all-encompassing in its scope.
The Man Who Was Thursday is a book caught up in the question of whether it places itself inside or outside of the sphere of its narrative chaos, yet at the same time a book perfectly content to lose itself in that chaos and, borne by the momentum of its own energy, to keep upping the narrative and metaphysical ante until the end--no matter the cost.
The book opens with a debate between Gabriel Syme and Lucian Gregory--ostensibly two London poets--dealing with the nature and value of anarchy. Gregory, a typically late nineteenth-century, post-Napoleonic, post-Baudelairean Poet of Chaos, asserts that all poets are inherently interested in destruction. Syme, for his part, asserts that the London Railway is the most beautiful poem in the world. It's a good debate: pithy and all-encompassing in its scope.
More, it's a good introduction to any novel about a debate between competing ideological forces. Here Structure and Anarchy: here we've defined our terms, we're given characters to go with the terms, we're shown those characters in conflict. It's an ideal setup for a good, if slightly stodgy novel of ideas in the Sartre or Camus mold--something interesting to think about just before yawning and rolling over for the night.
Turning the Tables: The Man Who Was Thursday
Then Lucian Gregory invites Gabriel Syme in for a drink, and within paragraphs confesses that all of his talk was just a smokescreen for his actual identity: a member of the cabal of true, fundamental anarchists that secretly plot the destruction of all order in the world. With the flip of some unseen switch, the table they sit at begins to spin on a monstrous screw and descend into the earth. Just like that everything we thought we knew about The Man Who Was Thursday from its open chapter suddenly no longer applies, and we no longer even think about falling asleep.
Turning the Tables: The Man Who Was Thursday
Then Lucian Gregory invites Gabriel Syme in for a drink, and within paragraphs confesses that all of his talk was just a smokescreen for his actual identity: a member of the cabal of true, fundamental anarchists that secretly plot the destruction of all order in the world. With the flip of some unseen switch, the table they sit at begins to spin on a monstrous screw and descend into the earth. Just like that everything we thought we knew about The Man Who Was Thursday from its open chapter suddenly no longer applies, and we no longer even think about falling asleep.
It's a shocking narrative move--literally a move from one level of allegory to another (just as Syme and Gregory literally move from the surface to the depths), and one that changes both the entire narrative logic of the book and the meaning of everything that has come before it. What's more: Chesterton keeps doing it again and again.
At various times, the action focuses on political drama, spy intrigues, disguises, cacophonous defenestrations, horse chases, balloon escapes and, ultimately, an allegory of a mirthful God. The swift variety and range of events actually brings the book to some of its weakest moments, simply because Chesterton's narrative momentum is so bent on undoing what it's done a few pages before that any reader would be hard pressed to feel connected to situations and characters that are probably going to turn out to be something else entirely just a chapter further on.
At various times, the action focuses on political drama, spy intrigues, disguises, cacophonous defenestrations, horse chases, balloon escapes and, ultimately, an allegory of a mirthful God. The swift variety and range of events actually brings the book to some of its weakest moments, simply because Chesterton's narrative momentum is so bent on undoing what it's done a few pages before that any reader would be hard pressed to feel connected to situations and characters that are probably going to turn out to be something else entirely just a chapter further on.
However, these weak places are not entirely liabilities. In fact, they serve two vital functions. One is, simply, to once again play out the basic conflict that drives the work's intellectual heart (and with Chesterton, "intellectual heart" is not a contradiction): the anarchy that propels the book requires the order that initiates the book to derive its emotional effects. The second is to accomplish a slow pull-back in the level of reader focus, moving from the Syme and Gregory that dominate the opening to the overarching metaphor through which Syme and the other characters bounce in the second half.
At some point, we just can't be interested in Syme anymore. We become interested in where he's going, and more: what it means that he's going there. This review won't spoil the ending (if the ending can even be spoiled; it resembles more than anything the sum, or summa, at the conclusion of a long series of mathematical operations, and is only meaningful in the context of these), except to say this: if anyone, critic, author, or laity, asserts that allegory is the death of art, is a total enervation of the life force that flows through any true work, then whoever makes the assertion has not read The Man Who Was Thursday.
At some point, we just can't be interested in Syme anymore. We become interested in where he's going, and more: what it means that he's going there. This review won't spoil the ending (if the ending can even be spoiled; it resembles more than anything the sum, or summa, at the conclusion of a long series of mathematical operations, and is only meaningful in the context of these), except to say this: if anyone, critic, author, or laity, asserts that allegory is the death of art, is a total enervation of the life force that flows through any true work, then whoever makes the assertion has not read The Man Who Was Thursday.
