‘Read again’ good

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
A nightmare
By G.K. Chesterton
Penguin Classics. 192 pages. £4.79
ISBN 978 0 141 199 771

The person who introduced me to this was Will Self.

Not in person, of course, but via Radio 4’s Cultural Exchange slot. It intrigued me that a liberal, intellectual Jew should choose, out of all of English literature, a short novel by an arch-conservative Catholic as his favoured work. And so I got hold of the book and loved it.

Destruction and creation

This book starts with a conversation at a garden party between an anarchist speaker and a law-loving poet, a confrontation between destruction and creation which forms the driving force of the novel. The novelist is recruited as a secret policeman and then is elected to the grand anarchist council. So the adventures of this council run through London, southern England and northern France as conspiracies are discovered and the anarchist leader’s identity is revealed.

Chesterton wrote this in 1908 while a young man in a period of doubt and at a time when anarchism was a real political force; at the end of his life he called it ‘a very melodramatic sort of moonshine’. It is in many ways a young man’s book: full of energy, fizzing with ideas and playing games with the readers’ expectations all the time. There are chase sequences which are genuinely gripping, memorable descriptions of London, passages where the surroundings change in surreal ways and other sections which are clearly allegorical. Although I often find such tricksy-ness pretentious, here the frequent doses of humour carried me along comfortably. Once I’m done with this review I want to go back and read this book again.

Order of the cosmos

C.S. Lewis somewhere called The man who was Thursday: ‘A powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each of us encounters in his single-handed struggle with the universe’. This is true, but it is also a celebration of the order of the cosmos and an exploration of attitudes to authority which are still relevant today. Do enjoy this book and lend it to your (maybe more bookish) friends. The nuggets of Christian ideas here are attractive and engaging — this book might nudge people who wouldn’t stoop to read Christian apologetics to begin a search for God.