Who Goes There?

One of the most beloved Christian apologists of his era, G. K. Chesterton came to prominence in the Edwardian era as a kind of jack of all trades when it came to writing, being a prolific essayist, poet, and short story writer. His Father Brown mysteries were pretty popular during Chesterton’s life and remain very much in print. (Curiously Chesterton came up with his Catholic priest detective character long before he himself converted to Catholicism.) His religious treatises Heretics and Orthodoxy were partly responses to avowed atheists of the era, such as George Bernard Shaw (Chesterton and Shaw were good friends, for the record), and partly to help those who considered themselves defenders of the faith in what was becoming a more secular England. You don’t have to be Catholic, or even Christian (as indeed I’m not), to enjoy Chesterton’s writing, since he tended to be very funny, and had kind of an Oscar Wilde-esque penchant for zingers. He’s a much finer prose stylist than H. G. Wells, his close contemporary, friend, and in some ways his foil. He also wrote his fair share of fantasy, including what is perhaps his single most famous work, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, one of the great novels of the 20th century.

Of course, how The Man Who Was Thursday counts as fantasy can be a point of contention with people, to the point where folks in the Famous Fantastic Mysteries letters column were wondering if it might even qualify as fantastic enough—although they enjoyed the novel as a whole. 1908 would be a bit of an annus mirabilis for Chesterton, as it saw the publications of both The Man Who Was Thursday and Orthodoxy, and despite being on its face an espionage novel (an early example of that genre) The Man Who Was Thursday might be as concerned with Christianity as Chesterton’s religious tracts. This is a reread for me, although I have to admit I mostly just stuck to the complete text rather than its FFM publication. I said in an earlier post that the novel’s FFM printing seems to be unabridged, but doing a side-by-side comparison between the Project Gutenberg text and FFM version for random passages show that the novel has been subtly abridged, from about 57,000 words to maybe 55,000—a difference the casual reader might not notice. Chapters and scenes remain intact, but sentences and even parts of sentences are occasionally tossed out the window, I have to assume for length but also for little flourishes that the editor (Mary Gnaedinger) might’ve considered a little too verbose.

Placing Coordinates

First published in 1908 and reprinted in the March 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which for some reason is not on Internet Archive. It is on Luminist at least, so there’s that. I will say, however, that aside from the novelty of Lawrence’s interiors (which are quite good) and a slightly altered text, I would simply read it on Project Gutenberg, it being in the public domain and all. Paperback copies are also not hard to find in the wild, this being a fairly well-known classic novel.

Enhancing Image

The Man Who Was Thursday is a masterpiece, and when it comes to novels as fine and yet weird as this one the question we have to ask ourselves is not “How did he do it?” but rather “How did he get away with it?” How did Chesterton get away with writing this? It’s what we would now call trippy, there’s certainly a hallucinatory effect that intensifies as the novel progresses; but it’s also a deeply Christian and at the same time political novel. Not only is anarchism mentioned but it’s the political ideology that takes center stage, at a time when anarchism in the US and England was gaining some very bad mainstream press, most infamously (at least for Americans) with Leon Czolgosz assassinating William McKinley in 1901. This novel was written in the 1900s, and presumably is set in that decade, what with there being “motor-cars” that predate the Ford Model T. So Chesterton introduces us to Saffron Park, a London suburb. These are not, however, the fog- and mud-covered streets of London as described at the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House; instead it’s a whimsical and implicitly fantastic introduction that hints at the madness to come. We’re introduced to Gabriel Syme, not as you would normally describe the protagonist in a narrative, but like the subjective viewpoint in a lucid dream—an angle Chesterton is going for quite deliberately. Between the novel’s subtitle and this opening passage about the people of Saffron Park it’s clear, at least with hindsight, that Chesterton is setting us up for something, only we’re not given to thinking anything is amiss at first. Not even Syme suspects what he’s in for, poor bastard. I could quote the whole passage, but I won’t.

We meet Syme and his friend/rival Lucian Gregory, who considers himself not only an earnest poet but a genuien anarchist—possibly the realest. Syme claims Gregory is full of shit, and so Gregory takes him on a journey to prove that he is, indeed, the realest. Gregory is quite the character, and I’m gonna frontload this review with discussion of him since once we get through the first few chapters we won’t see him again until the very end of the novel. It isn’t apparent at first, but Gregory will serve a major symbolic purpose, on top of being reponsible for kicking off the plot, being a tenacious red-haired man, someone who considers himself both a genuine creator (a poet, or an artist) and a genuine destroyer (anarchist) “a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.” He is contrasted with his sister Rosamond, who similarly has fiery red hair but whose demeanor is much kinder; she’s a minor character, and like Gregory she’s gonna be absent for most of the novel, but we’ll eventually get back to her. Indeed we have no choice but to remember Rosamond, as she will be the only female character of any importance. I said this is a great novel, I didn’t say it would be all that egalitarian. As for Syme and Gregory, whom Chesterton calls at one point “these two fantastics” (these are not realistic characters, or even actors on a stage, but water-colored figures in a fairy tale), the two take a trip to what turns out to be the entrance to a secret lair, with a password and everything. The password in question is “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,” which is funny considering Gregory and other anarchists would have to recite the name of a notorious conservative politician of the time.

Political humor. Tehe.

Before we continue with the plot, I wanna stop for a moment to illustrate how the FFM printing occasionally removes sentences or sentence fragments, seemingly to achieve a punchier effect in places where Chesterton is being verbose, such that these passages would be considered the least necessary. Readers wouldn’t have missed out on much, but what they did miss would’ve often been little juicy nuggets of prose. Take this passage for example, in which Syme and Gregory are traversing the secret passage which leads to the Council’s hideout. I’ve bracketed the section which the FFM printing excludes:

They passed through several such passages, and came out at last into a queer steel chamber with curved walls, almost spherical in shape, but presenting, with its tiers of benches, something of the appearance of a scientific lecture-theatre. There were no rifles or pistols in this apartment, but round the walls of it were hung more dubious and dreadful shapes, things that looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds. They were bombs[, and the very room itself seemed like the inside of a bomb. Syme knocked his cigar ash off against the wall, and went in.]

Sure, we don’t need to know that last fragment, as it doesn’t further the plot or action, but it sounds better than simply “They were bombs.” Anyway, Gregory is convinced he’s gonna be the new Thursday in the Council of the Days, a league of European anarchists, the best and most fiendish the movement has to offer. Each member of the Council takes on an alias after a day of the week, and the previous Thursday died recently. There’s gonna be a vote tonight. Syme and Gregory have each sworn a secret to each other, which each party is to keep to himself—a tragic development for Gregory, given Syme’s secret is that he’s actually an undercover cop. Gregory just led a cop into a den of anarchists. What a dumbass. But all is not lost, as Syme is not only here by himself, unable to call for backup, but he’s also sworn that he’d keep the hideout a secret. Since these men are English, their word turns out to be good enough. The Man Who Was Thursday is a uniquely British novel in several ways, not the least of them being that if this were an American story Syme wouldn’t give a fuck about keeping a secret with a man who evidently sees him as an adversary once he reveals his true identity. To make matters worse, while Gregory is poised to become the new Thursday, Syme comes in with an improvised speech that blows Gregory’s out of the water, and the despite the fact that surely nobody at the meeting would have seen Syme before he wins the vote and becomes the new Thursday. More or less on a whim, it sseems. Gregory is not happy about this, and it’s hard to blame him considering once Syme becomes Thursday Gregory will vanish from the narrative until the end.

Syme is the main character, so let’s talk about him. Syme is not your conventional hero, or even much of a heroic figure. I’m not just saying this because he’s a cop. Having descended from a line of eccentrics, Syme has become neurotic about his family of nonconformists and has gone in the total opposite direction—of being in favor of order to the point of lunacy. We’re treated to what I remember as being the only conventional flashback in the whole novel, in which we’re given Syme’s backstory, how he had a chance meeting with an unusually philosophically-minded policeman, and of his encounter with a mysterious man in “the dark room,” evidently not seeing the man’s face but being given the lofty job of policeman. His job thus was to go undercover and infiltrate the Council of the Days, to put a stop to the anarchist movement in England from the inside. This is a bit of an unusual scene since it breaks away from what is otherwise is a more or less linear narrative, but we do get an explanation for Syme’s strange obsession with the anarchists, not to mention we get some really good lines from the cop he talks to. A little quibble I have with this book, which I think comes close to perfect on the whole, is that the pacing does go kind of sideways. The first two chapters are a perfect setup-payoff affair, totally engrossing and with a promising of escalating tension, only for the narrative to jump backwards abruptly momentarily. I also have to admit that once Gregory leaves the novel and we’re introduced to the Council that the plot sort of funnels, or rather that there’s a snowball effect in which you have a straight shot to the climax over the course of about a hundred pages. Most of this novel can feel like one long chase sequence.

So we meet the Council, who will accompany Syme as main characters for the rest of the novel, although some members get more attention than others. It’s a bit of an ensemble effort, and Chesterton doesn’t give himself too much wordage. With how many ideas it throws at the reader The Man Who Was Thursday could’ve easily been double its length if published today, but Chesterton, being accustomed to short-length works like poems and essays, wasn’t much of a novelist, or rather he didn’t have the prolonged stamina expected of the writer who thinks themself a novelist first. Instead he hits the reader with a shotgun blast of symbols and characters. None of the members of the Council is very developed, individually, but they prove to be greater than the sum of their parts. There is, of course, Sunday, the head of the Council, an almost impossibly large man with a face that could take up the whole sky—a character not too dissimilar from Chesterton, for his physical largness but also his charima. There’s Monday, only otherwise known as the Secretary, who acts as Sunday’s right-hand man and most devoted follower, and who delivers one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “A man’s brain is a bomb.” There’s Gogol as Tuesday, a cartoonish Pole among mostly Englishmen—although it turns out that “Gogol” is, in fact, a Cockney policeman in disguise. There’s the Marquis de St. Eustache as Wednesday, a noble Frenchman who acts as if he jumped out of one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels. There’s my personal favorite, Professor de Worms as Friday, who’s so old and dicrepit that Syme wonders how he even made it to the Council meeting. Finally there’s Dr. Bull as Saturday, a young and mischievous yet enigmatic fellow whose “smoked spectacles” hide his eyes. These are basically cartoon characters, but whereas that would be considered shallow writing in realistic fiction, Chesterton uses the men’s broad-strokes characterizations for humor, as well as symbolic purposes.

Sunday outs Gogol as an undercover cop at the meeting, although despite Gogol being a cop Sunday doesn’t have him killed or anything; in what I have to admit is a confusing turn of events Sunday just… lets Gogol go free? The poor Cockney has a fall down the stairs by accident, but he’s fine, and we even see him much later in the novel safe and sound. But since Gogol is the first Council member to be outed as a cop he also gets the least time to shine; it’s a good thing, then, that his one scene where he’s the focus is pretty funny. I’m sorry, did I say “first” Council member to be outed as a cop? Well that’s because Syme and Gogol aren’t the only cops in the Council. It’s hard to say what counts as spoilers for this novel, since I’ve seen people argue that even the ending doesn’t really count as a spoiler, seeing as how the subtitle anticipates. It’s also easy to see, on a second reading, how Chesterton sets up his novel as a work of fantasy (albeit surreal rather than “high” or “low” fantasy) from the very beginning. Certainly the series of events here soon proves to be improbable, if not outright fantastic. What are the odds of there being multiple policement undercover in the Council of Days, and that these cops would be unaware of each other’s missions? Syme didn’t know who Gogol really was, and after some investigating he comes to find he didn’t know who Professor de Worms was either—not a horribly old nihilist but a relatively young actor who took on the role of a real man he once met named Professor de Worms. Wilks, the cop who has been impersonating de Worms, uses makeup and body language for the sake of a performance. Like Syme, Wilks is a man of order who has such a disdain for disorder (or, as he says, nihilism) that he comes out looking half insane for it. Chesterton seems to be saying that police and anarchist, both driven in their ideals to the point of mania, are two sides of the same coin. It goes to explain why Syme and Gregory are opposites, yet they have an affinity for each other that will come back into play at the very end.

Before we get waist-deep in the plot, or rather the prolonged chase sequence as I had mentioned, let’s talk a bit more about Chesterton’s faith and politics, and how they figure into what is a deeply religious and political novel. Chesterton is now known as a Catholic apologist, although he didn’t convert to Roman Catholicism until fairly late in life, a good 14 years after The Man Who Was Thursday was published; he was, however, already a devout Anglican who had written essays and books aimed at Christian readers, regardless of denomination. One reason I suspect this novel works with readers who may or may not share Chesterton’s faith is that while the dialogue and even character functions are laced rather strongly with Biblical meaning (Rosamond is a walking symbol of Christian grace), it’s not a work that gets stuck in the quagmire of church minutia. Just as an example, you have to admit that if you’re a secular (or even non-Catholic) fan of Gene Wolfe that his work can occasionally be stifling with its uniquely Catholic symbolism. Or to use another example, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a very good novel, but its dead give-aways as a pre-Vatican II novel meant it became dated just a few years after publications. The Man Who Was Thursday has no such issues, and while Chesterton’s both-sidesing of police and anarchists can come off a bit centrist in a way, the notion that police are not embodiments of good necessarily (Syme notes at one point, with dismay, that one of the police’s functions is to terrorize London’s working class) can actually be taken as a progressive stance. Granted, Chesterton’s framing of anarchism is unflattering (especially given Gregory’s symbolic purpose, which we’ll get to), but it could be a lot worse for 1908.

There Be Spoilers Here

Three, then four, and so on, Syme discovering that each man in the Council is an undercover cop, such that ultimately everyone in the Council (even the Secretary) who isn’t Sunday is secretly a cop—yet none of these knew any of the others were police. Each man admits to having been recruited into the service by a man in a dark room, a man none of them can identify. Each man has taken on a disguise, and each encounter has that disguise peeled back to reveal a man of nobility—if also eccentricity. Professor de Worms is shown to be a stage actor underneath his old-man makeup, the Marquis is shown to not be quite as statuesque a man as thought since much of his bulk turns out to be padding, Dr. Bull’s eerie spectacles come off to reveal a youthful innocence, and so on. Each man is not quite what he appears to be, which is fitting considering the climax of the novel takes place at a masquerade, whose unlikelihood by this point goes unopposed given how the action has escalated into unlikelier and unlikelier territory. I called much of this novel a chase sequence, but it could also be likened to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland comparison is apt, and it’s one Chesterton all but explicitly makes.

I said I would refrain from quoting whole passages, indeed a hard task with such a quotable novel, but I’ll make an exception with perhaps the finest of Sunday’s monologues—or at least I feel justified in quoting most of it here. It’s a badass and memorable passage, not least because of its surrealism. Up to this point Sunday has come off as a larger-than-life figure, but as the novel approaches its final stretch it’s become clear that Sunday is no ordinary man—indeed that he might not be strictly human. What is Sunday, then? A common interpretation is that Sunday is God, although it must be said that if he’s meant to be God then he is not the merciful father figure of the gospels, but the somewhat conniving God who makes a bet with Satan over whether Job will give up his faith. Sunday is not an anarchist, but then he’s also not a cop; rather he seems to be playing both sides against each other, order against disorder, to see who will come out on top. In this light it’s hard to call him a villain, but then he’s certainly not heroic. Maybe he’s beyond human conception of good and evil?

Anyway, here it is:

“You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”

Right before taking off in a hot air balloon (yes, there’s a chase involving a hot air balloon) Sunday finishes with perhaps the biggest revelation in the novel other than the ending: “I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.” After the chase with the hot air balloon, plus another chase involving Sunday on an escaped elephant, the men of the Council finally meet their tormenter face-to-face at a masquerade, one in which each of the men has been given a suit whose design corresponds with a day of the creation in Genesis. (These colorful outfits are lovingly depicted on the FFM cover, by the way, with Syme and company on a chess board, with massive hands [presumably Sunday’s] manipulating them.) Then there’s Sunday, and most surprisingly (for Syme anyway) there’s Gregory, who reappears quite literally in these last few pages. If Monday through Saturday are days of the creation and Sunday is God, then Gregory, the one genuine anarchist, is shown to be analogous to Satan. (Remember the red hair?) The very fabric of reality seems to be tearing itself apart at this point, the action becoming so heightened that the novel threatens to break through some kind of wall, from the unlikely into the impossible.

Then Syme wakes up.

The subtitle, A Nightmare, turns out to be quite literal. Of course, if this novel is supposed to be a nightmare then it’s a weirdly funny one—not horror but surreal and maybe discomforting comedy. The “it was all a dream” ending tends to be disparaged, and for good reason, a major exception being the ending of this novel, which is perhaps the most befuddling part of the whole thing. Something I wanna point out is that to my recollection The Man Who Was Thursday has only one scene break, which happens at the very end, as Syme suddenly wakes up and finds that he’s been walking and in the middle of a conversation with Gregory—only this doesn’t seem to be the Gregory of the dream. The meaning behind this one scene break, which divides the nightmare from reality, is lost in the FFM printing, wherein for some reason the editors thought it necessary to provide more conventional scene breaks. This ending is very strange, not least because of how brief it is (only half a magazine page) and how there isn’t any dialogue here. It’s ambiguous how different Syme and Gregory are from their dream counterparts, but at the very least they’re good friends in the real world. We had been reading a fantasy novel this whole time, but we didn’t know it, and neither did Our Hero™. Despite the experience of having had such a vivid dream, and somehow in the middle of a conversation, Syme feels awoken in more ways than one, as if suddenly made aware of the performance of a miracle, or as if “in possession of some impossible good news.” Even if the whole adventure with the Council of Days didn’t happen in the real world, the Christian significance of it left its mark on Syme. We even meet Rosamond again, for the first time in over a hundred pages, that symbol of grace with the “gold-red” hair (compared with Gregory’s flaming redness) who, naturally, we see tending a garden—her little Eden.

A Step Farther Out

You could go on for a while about this novel, as despite its brevity Chesterton is playing with a few layers, not to mention that’s simply a very entertaining (and increasingly fucking wild) ride from start to finish. The Man Who Was Thursday is at once a spy novel involving a council of anarchists and also an Alice in Wonderland-esque journey backwards to the beginnings of Judeo-Christian theology. It works because even if you disagree with Chesterton’s religious views (as indeed I disagree), not to mention his not-totally-flattering depiction of anarchism, it still has the capacity to entertain and provoke thought. I’ve read it twice now and I can say it’s easily the best novel I’ve covered on this site, and was probably the best novel ever printed in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. It’s fairly accessible for an Edwardian novel, but it’s also very unusual in that it’s not a realistic novel at all. Reading The Man Who Was Thursday is like getting drunk and then taking an edible, and then an hour later some dude walks in and starts reading Bible passages aloud at you after the edible’s taken effect.

I mean this in a good way, of course.

See you next time.