The Man Who Was Thursday – A Nightmare

Remember that kids. A nightmare. It is important.

So G.K. Chesterton was a big guy who threw his weight around and liked to use rhetoric to argue with people, on all points concerning mankind and society, until he died? A man after my own heart. Truly. I picked this book up because I had found it and subsequently purchased a copy after I learned it makes its way into Neil Gaiman’s top 10 books. That he has read. In his life! That has some notoriety to it. Not that I would read all books on his list, he described one as a “slow version of Dickens’ Bleak House” and I nearly fell over with exhaustion just imagining it.

And some background on Gilbert Keith: He was a massive man, joked about it, wrote a lot about politics and religious apologetics, also wrote poetry, mystery, fantasy and spent the rest of his time arguing philosophies with George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was a modernist, and Chesterton an orthodox Catholic. But they had very spirited bouts and always remained great friends. Wish we could do that more now days. I mean I can, I don’t care who believes what, just as long as we all are good humoured about it and the views of others.

Anyway he wrote The Man Who Was Thursday as a detective novel where people are recruited into an anti-anarchist wing of Scotland Yard’s detective agency and must use their wit to infiltrate the ring of anarchists known to be amongst commoners in London, but operating out of the London Underground. The plot follows Gabriel Syme, who outwits a man named Gregory, who is an anarchist trying to prove to Syme that they are a real force to be reckoned with. Syme must protect his own identity, however, and accomplishes this by suggesting Gregory isn’t a good enough anarchist at a secret meeting Gregory drags him to where they are voting on a new leader of their local chapter, which happens to be a position in the council of 7 and is code-named Thursday. He uses leverage to speak to the council and gives such a great speech, condemning Gregory, that he wins the vote. Syme is going to be Mr. Thursday!

 

Once at these meetings of the 7, Syme learns something awful, however. That they no longer believe in keeping anarchy a secret, and instead believe the best way to appear harmless if for the heads to appear right out in the open. Has to make the detective nervous. What’s worse? (SPOILER ALERT!) Syme learns quickly that five of the seven member are also secret detectives like him, policemen from Scotland Yard sent to infiltrate the Council.

Even more mindblowing is that they learn all this as they come together, and figure out that a real anarchist revolution is going on without them, whilst they are busy hunting each other down in the woods trying to point out members that are actual anarchists. Turns out none of them are! And the anarchists move on with an insane plan, leaving them all hopeless and desperate.

In the end, Sunday is revealed as Gregory, only masked, and tells them all that his people are the ones who have suffered, hence the revolt. But good Syme responds with a “you don’t know what I just went through, what I experienced, what I suffered” speech and caps it off with a quote from Jesus: “can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” Bravo G.K. Nightmare over. Book end.

I thought it was a nice, short and simple story with great post-Victorian British humour and rhetoric. I don’t know when I aged 120 years and started enjoying that stuff, my guess is sometime after my first go at Dickens’ Bleak House, but I really do like that stuff. If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. Otherwise, it is a fairly entertaining nightmare.