The Man Who Was Thursday

I must admit I probably would never have come across G.K. Chesterton's book if it hadn't been for the Summer School. But I'm extremely grateful that I did, because it's a fantastic book! I just read it for the 3rd time and still can't get over the brilliant surrealism. It's one of these books you can immediately imagine as a film - in my case I can see it as one of those 1960s technicolour films, but mixed with a little bit Tim Burton. Yep, it's that surreal. Maybe I should outline the plot before I go on, so that those of you who haven't read it can get at least a rough idea:

The era the story is set in isn't explicitly mentioned, but I would say it's around the Edwardian time, so early 20th century. The undercover policeman Gabriel Syme belongs to a special anti-anarchist unit of Scotland Yard. He meets the anarchistic poet Lucian Gregory and manages to infiltrate a branch of the anarchist society (which ironically only acts according to very strict and specific rules) and even to become elected as a new member of the anarchist council, which consists of the seven most powerful anarchists. They are all named after days of the week, with Sunday being the supreme leader and initiator of terrorist attacks. Syme becomes Thursday and goes to meet the council. Then a lot of things happen which I don't want to give away in case you want to read the book, but let me tell you this: Nothing is as it seems.

I knew I would like the book after I had read the first two sentences. I know, that sounds exaggerated, but let me just quote these sentences to you:

"The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its skyline was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild."

 I think I read those sentences three or four times before I proceeded to the next, because they're just so wonderful, bursting with alliterations, and have a great rhythm to them.
But the language is not the only great thing about this novel, mainly it's the characters, especially the seven council members. They are all too exaggerated to seem realistic, and yet you don't really question them, because the whole atmosphere of the book is rather dream-like, which always makes me think of a German play I read in school once, Kleist's The Prince of Homburg. It is also important to note that the subtitle of Chesterton's book is 'A Nightmare', which I think is spot on. The whole story really reads like a nightmare - but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It is, very very funny in fact. The humour too is mostly very surreal and at times quite pythonesque, for example in the chase scene (involving an elephant) where Sunday throws little notes out of the window of his carriage, or when Syme and the Professor invent a finger-tapping language to have secret conversations and start tapping out the most ridiculous long sentences.

There's a lot of debate going on about whether Chesterton was trying to convey a deeper meaning (one cannot deny that Sunday is portrayed very much like Christ or God), or whether he just wanted to write a cool, funny, weird book (which he certainly did). In the preface to his book, a poem to his childhood friend Edmund Clerihew Bentley (who invented the clerihew), Chesterton says, speaking about their childhood experiences together:

"This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells/  And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells - / Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men yet crash, / Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash. / The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand - / Oh, who shall understand but you: yea, who shall understand?"

So maybe we're not supposed to understand what this book is really about - but if you ask me, that makes it even more intriguing. Everytime I read it or think about it, there's something new to discover or to interpret differently. But at the end of the day, despite all those different interpretations and theories about it, it's just a marvellous book. And that is good enough for me.