The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton (1908)
This was the first book of the year that I found a real slog. The overplayed jokes, self congratulatory prose, and milquetoast tone made this short novel a plodding read.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a book that could only entertain people who have lived exceedingly mild lives. It never felt threatening, it never felt interesting, and the humour never raised much more than an isolated snort. And nothing illustrates this failure better than that Chesterton could make me feel so indifferent despite its central theme: Metaphysical warfare.
The Man Who Was Thursday follows an undercover policeman infiltrating a cabal of powerful anarchists who have resolved to utterly destroy civilization. Anarchism, at the time the book was written, was not only a much more prominent political force but also often used as a synonym for the word ‘terrorist’. Chesterton caricature is thus less absurd than it might otherwise be, especially given the strain of violent nihilism prevalent in early 1900’s anarchism. Thursday, the novels titular double agent, is tasked with fighting not just the anarchists bombing campaigns, but against their assault on the soul of western civilization.
The cabal itself is headed by a monstrous man; huge, skilled and supernaturally able. Sunday, as this anarchist primarch is known, is a physical and intellectual giant who exudes an inescapable, primordial evil. Thursday is scarcely able to escape him even in thought. And many other characters in the novel relay how he appears to each as some different incarnation of malice. On the face of it, Sunday shares striking similarity to the most menacing figure ever put to paper: Judge Holden.
But like just about everything else in The Man Who Was Thursday, Sunday is a boring character—at once verbose and overly simplistic.
The writing holds a lot of the blame for making such a good premise so bland, but I also think Chesterton’s conception of intellectual threat is at fault. The Anarchist cabal are dangerous because they totally reject existing values, root and stem. It is not their positive content, not their organisation, nor even material power which make them a threat, but that they stand against everything. This is also part of the novels joke, that because they are so absurd and nothing but reverse-reactionaries, no one takes them seriously and, thus, they can operate with impunity. But when we look around the world today, we see this sort of ultra-sophism—rejection of all but subjective experience—is neither apocalyptic nor impotent. It is harmful, but not to entrenched power. To be fair, G.K does make some sort of nod to radical individualism being popular with unmoored elites rather than the working man, but never goes anywhere with the idea.
Ultimately, the problem with the central philosophical thesis/joke of The Man Who Was Thursday is that its just too abstract. Nothing feels, or indeed is (sort of spoiler) truly real. Its a dreamy power fantasy of moral warfare without any reference to struggle in the real world.
And it is poorly written.
-Ben Shread-Hewitt