This is a comment GKC made regarding Thursday:
"...The point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy, and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf who had appeared
to be rather too like a pantomime ogre. This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to be so described.
But this error was entirely due to the fact that they had
read the book but had not read the title page. In my case, it is true, it was a question of a subtitle rather than a title. The book was called The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was,
even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt,
which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.
I notice that on the paperback version of this book, Kingsley Amis calls it, "The most thrilling book I have ever read." And indeed it starts out very strong.
The narrator is introduced to a band of terrorist anarchists who, one by one, are revealed to all be agents sent by a single man -- a man who turns out to be something like a god. That is the nightmare part.
What can I say. Chesterton is a great writer and his Father Brown stories are excellent both as mysteries and as moral inquiries. I wish I knew Father Brown.
There is no such likable character in "The Man Who Was Thursday." Oh sure the writing is up to Chesterton's usual high standard, and the story moves along well enough, and I was never bored.
But I was left wondering what the point was -- especially since Chesterton himself disavowed the most obvious reading (that the man in charge was actual some sort of insane God). I imagine Chesterton scholars can explain the whole thing, but I was left wishing for something.
On the other hand, this book makes me think of stories like Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" (spoiler alert, if you haven't already read that really good mystery) in which the central crime is eventually revealed to actually not have occurred. In Chandler's moral universe, no explanation is necessary, but somehow I had hoped for more from the creator of Father Brown.
In a surreal turn-of-the-century London, Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited to a secret counter-terrorist taskforce at Scotland Yard. Syme persuades Lucian Gregory, an anarchist, to lead him to the local terrorist cell, where he is elected as the cell's representative to the worldwide council of anarchists — the Central Anarchist Council — seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a code name. His efforts to thwart the council's intentions and oppose all anarchic acts reveal a comical number of unlikely allies. Ultimately, Syme and his fellow champions of order confront the head anarchist, only to find their perception of order and chaos turned completely upside down. The novel's subtitle, "A Nightmare," is a summation of the frightening and increasingly surreal world in which Syme finds himself enmeshed.
