Paul’s review of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare > Likes and Comments

My favourite quote from this book is: "Revolt in the abstract is revolting."

so far this book is a very strange spoof.

Nice review - was there any pattern to the distribution of facial hair? E.g. goodies had moustaches and baddies had beards?

I am afraid that to answer this question would be to perpetrate a spoiler! (A lot of it is fake.)

Haven't read this, but the comparison to The Chase is intriguing. That is such an odd film--I rather liked it though.

so many folks consider this a masterpiece, but i cannot even make as much coherence of it as you paul. and also on the beard thing, maybe author is alluding to those grizzly bear guys? i think that's what they are called.

nah, it's folk singers.

The photo on his author page makes him look like a man who has listened to too much folk music...or something.

I absolutely love this book (Chesterton's best effort imho). At the same time, I totally relate to your review.

I could see people loving this book because it's unique & has a goofiness all of its own.

Well, I did like the goofiness, but I also liked the sometimes-poetic descriptions, and also... well, perhaps coming from a Christian religious background the same as the author may have helped some with the ending?

could be - care to explain it for me?

There are two allusions to biblical stories in the last chapter of the book. The first has to do with Job, where Bull mutters something about the sons of God gathering before God, along with the Accuser (comes from Job 1:6). Job's story details God allowing Satan to bring magnificent evil and pain upon Job in order to test him, to see whether Job would forsake God and curse His name or cling to God in his greatest time of need.

The second is the last sentence of the book, where a quote from Jesus runs through Syme's head. In the story, two of Jesus' disciples ask Jesus to be placed to the right and left of His throne in heaven. Jesus asks if they are able to drink the same cup, or if they are able to experience the pain and loss that He is about to go through on the cross in order to receive incomprehensible glory and joy.

As far as I can understand, the idea is that God allows men to go through evil to be able to more clearly see good. Sunday allows the 6 men to experience hurt, delusion, and confusion so that they could rebut Gregory's last accusation - that they can't experience reality and joy because they have never experienced pain.

thanks very much for that Nic! I like your interpretation. Doesn't make this remarkable book any less crazy however.

GKC might be bonkers. He might be crazy. But he is irrepressibly sane and makes sense when all the silliness is boiled away. The man is not afraid to go way, way out on a limb to make his point, as witness his other fiction -- all of which has the same manic quality. For instance: The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, The Ball and the Cross, The Flying Inn, Manalive, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Having read all his fiction and many of his essays, I believe there madness in his method and method in his madness.

I agree that this book became incoherent by the end. It also became rather boring and silly (without being funny) after the first couple chapters. To my mind, it started out promising - it was amusing and intriguing - but then the novel fell apart as soon as Syme met up with the other members of the 'central anarchist council'.

I suppose it was the I-can't-believe-this-was-written-in-1908 thing which kept me turning the pages. I wonder if you have ever read At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien? Another very strange one.

If it comes across as absurd, it's because it reflects the absurdity of the system which it is mocking. It's a perfectly twisted criticism of anarchism and, to some degree, the hypocrisy of the liberalists in London at the time.

a lot of the contemporary political satire will be lost on a modern reader, so it may be one of those novels where you need a critical introduction to set the scene. But even then, I don't think the modern reader will really get it.

Probably. Pretend Syme is a republican invading a democratic caucus and it becomes a little clearer (or vice versa, though it falls apart a little more that way)

I guess I'm still trying to figure out the 2-star rating. All you did was say great things about the book. Could you clarify exactly why you didn't like it? I genuinely don't understand.

It was just so silly!

i thought it was too wordy and took too long to have anything happen. so for me, it was too old fashioned. and silly.

Paul I am also a bit lost. I listened to the audiobook, which I felt was quite well done/directed, the narrator's tone accentuated some of the silliness in a fun way, and the story definitely kept my attention. But I was hoping for a (at least somewhat) clear "main point" at the end, and that absolutely did not happen from my perspective. It's been a bit enlightening to read some of the comments on this string; however, I'm still not sure I "get it!"

I am with you - as I said it seems to end up as some kind of incoherent religious parable, but jeez, I dunno.
Sure is memorable though!

This is one of my all-time favorite books.
The beard-thing only shows how much Chesterton was ahead of his time, it's all magazines seem to be raving about these days :-p
I won't pretend I could make perfect sense of the ending either, but I'm sure Gilbert Keith could, spiked cocoa or no :-D
Very funny review, though I respectfully disagree with the meager amount of stars you chose to bestow on it ;-)

Hi Matthias - so what do you think this craze book is all about? I'd be disappointed if it was a local political allegory (like the Book of Revelations) and even more if it was "just a dream".

Paul wrote: "Hi Matthias - so what do you think this craze book is all about? I'd be disappointed if it was a local political allegory (like the Book of Revelations) and even more if it was "just a dream"."
Well, the title does say it is a "nightmare", so any disappointment stemming from that could have been avoided.
I don't think this book has necessarily just "one point". When you ask me what it's about, the only lame answer I can come up with off the top of my head is "life". And faith. Yes, I want to punch myself in the face right now as well, but there you have it anyway. Chesterton never strays too far away from Christian allegories.
I don't consider this book to be a message though, but mainly a theater for philosophical dialogues. The decor: uncertainty. Chesterton transmitted that feeling of uncertainty really well, sometimes in a lighthearted way, sometimes more oppressively and used that setting to make his characters ask the questions that matter. Their answers might be rubbish but well, so is everyone else's. At least Chesterton presents his with a whole lot of style!

I think that's about the size of it. You can see that if a reader is not expecting a bizarre Christian allegory and really doesn't get any help whatsoever from the author then general befuddlement may well ensue.

I always wonder why we humans have such a low appreciation of our abilities that we often think we can not be creative and imaginative without chemical assistance.

I think I missed the moral relativism thing.

Was thinking I might want to read this.
Then read your review & changed my mind.
...Now I DEFINITELY want to read it.
This sounds fantastic! Thanks :)

it does and it gets better in my memory...

I don't think it's 'bonkers.' More like Kafka plus optimism. Astute readers will spot the intelligence at work underneath. See Syme's speech at the start about how the most poetic thing in the world is the underground railway.

you don't think the elephants and the balloons and the beards are bonkers ? I confess I did.. Bonkers does not preclude intelligence, I think. Chess grandmasters are all bonkers.

Or the bloodless swordsman, or the great torchlit convocation at the end.

I did say Chesterton was Kafka plus optimism for a reason. As in Kafka, dream logic trumps reality for brief periods, as the book’s subtitle ‘a nightmare’ tips you off before you turn page 1.

The real similarity isn’t events, in the main. It’s in dialogue. Frequently one character will say something odd or puzzling but Chesterton makes in apparent nonsense clear. As with Symes’ speech about the underground, which leads into his demolition of the notion that artists should be lawless.

Elsewhere Chesterton has a character tried to shooting at a crowd. At his trial, his defence was that he was aiming to miss and so never hit anyone: each person left the scene with a sharper, fuller appreciation of life than before as a result. Making whimsy or oddness morph into sanity was Chesterton’s great knack.

I should have said, ‘Chesterton makes the sense hidden within apparent nonsense clear.’

Ryan, you need to rewrite your review with all of that in it!

No point. Others - Anthony Burgess, John Carey - have already said much the same thing, but better.

ah, well, the fact that other brainier people than me have already said similar things about the books I read never puts me off !

I remember my father had this book (translated, in Dutch) in his bookcase, As a boy, I was intrigued by its title. And I thought Chesterton also wrote the Father Brown series, which I had seen on tv. But your review sheds a whole different light on this. The idea of 'was this really written in 1908?' is interesting, some novels do have this - somehow disturbing but also fascinating - resonance. If it is really as strange as At Swim-Two-Birds, it surely must be weird.

lol this book is so WEIRD, was he on DRUGS????

The thing about the beards is so true. I'm pretty sure almost every page has a facial hair mention, it's crazy.

Well, not ALL of the characters are men. The book almost opens with Gregory’s red-haired sister, Rosamond, and then ends with her (and she had no beard).

Sean wrote: "I always wonder why we humans have such a low appreciation of our abilities that we often think we can not be creative and imaginative without chemical assistance."

Yes indeed.

It's both hilarious and tragic to me that, in this efficiency obsessed modern age, a man cannot possibly be credited for vivid imagination unless he's using substances to acquire said imagination.
How poor and sad are we...