The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmareDownload Now...
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Product Description
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.
Amazon.com Review
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
Customer Review: Early terrorism thriller
Today it's al Qaeda... in Chesterton's time it was anarchists, ("no government is good government," sort of early-period extremist Libertarians).
But here Chesterton spun a fascinating tale of a policeman who goes under-cover to foil a bomb plot. The seven anarchists involved use day-of-the-week code names; thus, our policeman becomes "Thursday".
As you approach the end of this fine work you might ask yourself, "Where the heck is this thing going?" But just hang in there -- it makes total sense when all is revealed.
While I don't consider this work a real genuine page-turner, it did manage to maintain my interest. For me, this is Chesterton's Magnum opus.
I highly recommend this 1908 book to anyone who is interested in thrillers, mysteries, and/or British literature.
Customer Review: Vapid and more than a little pretentious
Most people find themselves unable to clearly express their ideas not because those ideas are brilliant, but because they are jumbled. I think Chesterton belongs to this latter sort. The book contains few original thoughts, although it does retell some basic philosophical problems semi-competently. That's about all there is to it--and, well, the prose is good. The action is vague and hackneyed--like a hollywood blockbuster. The characters are stilted, lifeless and asexual. One has to smoke a lot of good pot or watch a lot of bad movies beforehand if one wishes to find this stuff impressive.
Customer Review: Your blue sock is behind the dryer.
I went into reading this book with such strong misconceptions concerning what it was about. Like the characters whom see things completely different it seems like the readers of this book see its meaning quite differently as well. It is a crazy allegory but of what?
On a stylistic level Chesterton's prose is unique and well crafted. Chesterton has his own voice in his writing powerful, artful, and clear. On an abstract level I can't help but feel I got something out of the book but I am at a loss to say what. I was told, long ago, that the book was about the futility of much of what passes for philosophy and the book was a mockery of this in the promotion of faith and traditional religious devotion. I only vaguely got the notion that the book was about this. I could see how the book was about the futility of judging others or creating "us" verse "them" groups because we are all brothers, the ideas and classifications we use to classify each other are futile and meaningless and make a mockery of humanity in the eyes of God, so go with the established/ traditional way of doing things otherwise one is really in rebellion with oneself; but I don't know for sure if that is correct.
Bottom line though is it was a fun book to read.
Customer Review: Chesterton hits close to home with this thriller
I wasn't sure what to expect when I was given this book by a friend - all I knew is that Chesterton is an amazing writer and I was not disappointed in the least after reading The Man Who was Thursday. The story is intriguing and moves the reader along page by page until one is almost finished with the book before even knowing it. The characters are interesting - and as one person commented about the book - the real characters are the ideas, not the individuals themselves. Chesterton is a master at communicating ideas and then embodies those ideas in characters which connect to the reader. This "psychological thriller" is more than just a quick, easy and entertaining read - it is actually quite provocative and in some sense unnerving in the same way that Huxley's Brave New World seems to strike too close to home in today's culture.
Customer Review: The perfect spy novel
Simply the best spy novel I ever read. Furthermore is a christian allegory of the contradictions of human nature viewed from a sinful perspective, which leads us to the marvelous mistery of the good and the evil, through the eyes of an undercover agent.
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