The Man Who Was Thursday

Now that we are all in (semi-) lockdown, I'm taking the opportunity to read some, at least, of my pile of unread books.  It's a bit on the towering side.

I'll post commentaries here and on Mens Sana (Facebook Group).

Here's the first one.

Mere Anarchy

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, (1908), (Penguin Edition, with ‘Introduction’ by Matthew Beaumont, 2011).

My, but this is an odd book. 

When I chose it from the pile of unread books, I thought I was picking a simple tale of derring-do, a ripping yarn rather akin to The Riddle of the Sands (Childers, 1903) or The Thirty-Nine Steps (Buchan, 1915), albeit hopefully leavened with Chesterton’s characteristic wit.   I knew it was about secret anarchists and plots, bombings and detectives, but that was about all I knew.  And around this time, there was a lot of fiction, and nonfiction concerning anarchists being written.

The Spirit of Revolt (Kropotkin, 1880), The Dynamiter (Stevenson, 1885), The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Potions, Etc, Etc (Most, 1885), The League of Twelve (Boothby, 1903), A Girl Among the Anarchists (Olivia and Helen Rossetti, 1903) and  The Secret Agent (Conrad, 1907) are all mentioned in the critical apparatus in the book. 

Nobel had patented dynamite in 1866 (first demonstrated in Redhill) and gelignite in 1876.  In 1893, the Chamber of Deputies in Paris was bombed; in 1894 there was an unsuccessful bomb attack on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and separately the French President was assassinated; in 1897 the Spanish prime minister was assassinated; in 1900 the King of Italy was assassinated; in 1906 there was a failed attempt to bomb the King of Spain;  and in the month Chesterton’s book was published the King of Portugal and his son were assassinated.  Bombs, revolutions, assassinations and anarchists were on everyone’s minds.

And there is a plot, a story which revolves around all of this material, as a detective/poet attempts to thwart an anarchist plot to bomb the Czar and the President of France, in Paris.  It is a plot concerning the fight between order and anarchy, as conducted by a brave individual.  But it is such an extreme, madcap, ridiculous plot that you end up coming to the conclusion that it isn’t really the point. 

Partly this is because it is written by Chesterton.  As such, the book is full of witty observations, paradoxes and inversions. 

“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp.  I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.” (p.8).

The paradoxes are even there in some of the chapter titles (11: ‘The Criminals Chase the Police’).  And while some of the observations feel hopelessly dated, many still seem quite fresh over a century later interesting – such as when he speaks of the uncanny feeling one gets at a waxworks (p.39) – an early example of the ‘Uncanny Valley’?  

Chesterton is also very good on small details and the quotidian.  He wants to describe everything, even the most mundane item.    He cares about the wonderfulness of the everyday, the banal ordinary.  As when the hero is inspired to courage by the sound of a simple, common barrel organ in Leicester Square.

At the same time, his abiding interest in the grotesque is ever-present.  Every one of the anarchists has odd, weird traits, unlikely facial expressions and tics.  None just look normal or unremarkable. 

So, in one sense this novel is Chesterton’s version of Browning’s dramatic monologues (see Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864) and many other individual poems).  And of course, he had written his excellent book on the poet in 1903, praising his grotesqueries and his interest in the quotidian, while arguing that these were also routes to the spiritual (I paraphrase). 

Amongst the grotesques the huge figure of the President of the anarchists stands out.  And as Chesterton himself was a large man, one begins by assuming that this is a self-portrait.  After all the President sets much of the plot in action and is feared by all the others; an obvious author-substitute.  However, by the end one realises this is probably not the case.  Or not just the case.

Because the end is quite unexpected.  If the story is so extreme and the characters so unlikely, that they undermine the whole notion of the adventure-narrative, and also play against Chesterton’s fine details and interest in the ordinary, which I would contend they do, then the conclusion of the novel takes another yet turn to the unexpected.

It goes all mythic and transcendent.  Arguably this may have been the only place left for Chesterton’s madcap narrative to go, but it still comes as a surprise.  Without saying too much, it goes supernatural and religious, and there are some interesting proto-surrealist touches.

…a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress.  Syme seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume.  There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon… one dancer dressed like an enormous hornbill, with a beak twice as big as itself…

                                                                                                                                    (p.152)

For Chesterton, nonsense was a type of writing replete with spiritual significance, because it so effectively communicates a sense of amazement at the ‘huge and undecipherable unreason’ of life itself. (Chesterton, The Defendant, (1901), taken from Beaumont’s ‘Introduction’).

So this isn’t just an adventure story from the early twentieth century.  Chesterton’s full title for the novel gives it away, in part.  It has all the logic of a mad dream. 

And it is a page-turner, but what those pages turn up is just not what you might expect.