About The Man Who Was Thursday
Post 1298:
There’s not much better than a good mystery. They were my first love, I think, far as genres go. As a tyke I was digging Columbo on TV and The Hardy Boys all day long.
So I pick up a copy of The Man Who Was Thursday at the bookstore knowing I was in for an automatic win. G.K. Chesterton writing a detective mystery? What could go wrong. He’s in my Mt. Rushmore of nonfiction writers. Plus mystery. Bang. Game-set-match.
It starts out feeling like a regular good time, only better. There’s a dark group of bad men that like blowing up stuff and there’s a cop who’s out to bring down these bad men before they can get up to more bad.
The evildoers are anarchists. Chesterton calls them bombers or dynamiters. He really thinks these are the most sinister of all villains. They want no order. This book, more than anything, is a treatise against disorder. He makes a typically lovely case for common decency and tradition and rules and cops and regular people and sees anarchists as the antithesis of all that goodness.
Stop right there. I’m going to be critical of GK in a second, but not because he’s against anarchy and I myself lean that way. He’s defining anarchy in the early 1900s fashion. I think the word as used in America today has changed. At least the way I see it. I’m for liberty and the reduction of institutional power because I think it will help decrease violence. GK would probably disagree. I see his points. He’s a good man with a good heart and his mistake, I think, is that people in power are like him.
I’m not so sure. In fact I’m pretty sure people in power are generally knuckleheads or worse.
Anyway, he’s brilliant and has a right to his opinions. On so many issues I agree wholeheartedly with him. His analysis of the poetic and the rational is one of my favorite things ever put to paper.
Back to the book. It has a really cool premise. And it feels like the plot is brilliant. Only thing is, the plot kind of turns into a foggy fever dream by the end. I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to understand everything he’s trying to say here. He may be too smart for me. I read it carefully. I read the forward and did some research. Nothing that helped to clarify his ultimate intention with the story.
Was it entertaining? Yes. Are there some pieces of golden insight? Yes. Does the story have you in its grip? Absolutely, until the end. But maybe I’m missing something. Try it out. Bless his heart, he made it short. So if it sucks, it probably costs you less time than watching the newest product from Netflix.
It’s a weird hybrid of a novel. Spiritual, philosophical, beautifully written—oh yeah, and it’s partially an old-fashioned mystery. Until its not.
The guy had balls to try wearing all those hats. Or a good literary agent. Cheers and see you after.
