What I had known about The Man Who Was Thursday was a spoiler. I had also known, more or less, that it was a religious investigation, but as a G.K. Chesterton book, I expected that, or rather, I expected it to be more or less like Father Brown, containing religious characters who are incapable of leaving religion out of their thoughts for very long.
It turns out that the book is something else entirely, a religious symbolic-expressionist nightmare; it is subtitled A Nightmare, so it shouldn’t, perhaps, have been entirely a surprise.
The spoiler I had known was that Thursday was the story of a police investigator who infiltrates an anarchist organization, ascends to the Council of Seven, code-named after the days of the week (He is Thursday, of course) and then races to prevent the assassination of the Czar in Paris, discovering along the way that one of his Colleagues is also an undercover police agent, and then that another is, and then another, until six of the seven are outed as police agents, and the leader of the council as the chief of the unit. That’s the famous bit, as far as I knew, and I’ve seen it referred to as if it were a sort of satire on intelligence gathering and infiltration of terrorist cells, or a satire on terrorist networks themselves. I expected to enjoy it on that level, with of course the G.K. Chesterton stuff in it to provoke me in various ways as well.
I was surprised to find that there was no infiltration, properly speaking, but that Thursday simply shows up, is taken to a meeting on a whim, and then through an already dreamlike sequence becomes chosen for the Council on that very night. The next morning, at the Council meeting (in a restaurant in Leicester Square), Tuesday is exposed. The next day sees two more exposures, and then the thing speeds up. Everybody seems to be wearing a false face; everybody wants to betray everybody but has no-one to betray them to; everybody wants to defend everybody but has nobody to defend them from. I thought the nightmarish and surreal plot was reaching a climax during the chase scene in France, but then we come back to London, where Sunday escapes the united Days first on a stolen fire truck and then on elephant back. And then in a hot air balloon.
And then things get strange.
At that point, we are working out the symbolic stuff, having left behind both the plot and the world. It’s all crazy, but crazy in that nightmarish way, where even the good things that happen seem wrong and frightening.
When the veil was lifted (or somewhat lifted) and I found myself the book of Job, I had been softened up enough by the bizarre book to be somewhat at home, there. And to find Mr. Chesterton’s dizzying and paradoxical Divinity powerful, and even persuasive, just a bit. Which is pretty impressive, when you think of it.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.