The Man Who Was Thursday

A cult novel from the early twentieth century, beloved of everyone from C.S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman to literally Kafka.

It starts at a peaceful suburban garden party, then plunges us into the secret anarchist conspiracy to bring down civilization, and the equally secret police force dedicated to stopping them. Duels, disguises, and mind-blowing revelations ensue, with writing just packed with Edwardian-era wit and charm.

If Lewis’ Till We Have Faces is a deeply buried metaphor for religious experience, The Man Who Was Thursday requires an excavator to unearth. Both books explain their metaphors in the final pages, but Thursday does this much less clearly. Unless you’re pretty familiar with Christianity, you’re probably gonna miss it. But what a wonderful surprise to get to the end of this strange story and realize that Chesterton was sneakily describing the sneakiness of God’s beauty, just like Lewis did.

Scotland Yard detective Gabriel Syme is charged with infiltrating a network of violent anarchists, which (rumor has it) is led by a mysterious arch villain known as ‘Sunday’. Syme serendipitously finds himself elected to the anarchists’ high council, and a kind of whimsical journey into the heart of darkness begins.

Chesterton’s book presents what is good as those things opposed to anarchy, e.g. order, justice, common decency…Syme stands for all of them. The further he infiltrates the anarchists’ society, though, the more his sense of the good is shaken. By the end it seems as though all of England has… show more.

In college, my friend David Michelson introduced me to many new authors, including G. K. Chesterton (best known for his Father Brown mysteries), who mixed philosophy and humor in his fiction. 

My favorite of his works is The Man Who Was Thursday, first published in 1908—a madcap, surreal romp through London, where undercover police are battling bomb-throwing anarchists and nothing is as it seems. 

On a long car trip, I recently listened to the audiobook of Thursday as performed by Nigel Peever, and laughed and thrilled all over again. 

The Man Who Was Thursday is a political thriller of the type that was common in the early 20th Century, much like The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Count Of Monte Cristo. The hero is a young man recruited to infiltrate an organization of anarchists that is dedicated to sowing chaos in the already unstable European monarchies. The Weird nature of the main antagonist increases the danger and the sense of paranoia that drives the story. What if the criminal mastermind you're pursuing really is something more than human?