Leonard Gaya's Reviews > The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Possibly the shortest way to describe Chesterton’s famous novel is to say that it is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for grownups. The story of Gabriel Syme is just as bizarre as that of little Alice. It also echoes in many ways with the oppressing nightmares of Kafka and Dostoyevsky.

Still, The Man Who Was Thursday starts like a rather typical detective novel. The protagonist comes in contact with a small group of anarchists/nihilists in a London basement who, to all appearances, are planning an attack against the tsar of Russia and the French président. Syme manages to get enrolled as one of the group, but we soon find out that he is, in fact, an undercover policeman, with a mission to stop the anarchists. This revelation is just the beginning of a series of “curiouser and curiouser” turn of events, coming thicker and faster, that will send Syme’s (and thereby the reader’s) head spinning into utter bewilderment and paranoia: “Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under his feet”. The end of the novel strings together a carnivalesque chase around London on elephant back and hot-air balloon, and a final revelation of Dantesque proportions.

Chesterton was able to capture, with his wonderfully chiselled prose, the atmosphere of London and the zeitgeist in Europe at the turn of the 20th century: communists, nationalists and anarchists on the rise and the menace of a significant terrorist attack — indeed, a couple of years after the publication of this novel, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand tipped the world over into war.

He also managed to turn a spy mystery into an utterly dizzying reflection on religious symbolism, mysticism and the nature of reality. This way of depicting ordinary existence and then twisting and wringing it out in ways that make it almost unrecognisable, but somehow express something hidden within it, undoubtedly inspired the surrealist movement. And, later on, quite a few American authors as well, like Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon, even Neil Gaiman. Not forgetting some Latin-American magic-realist writers, primarily, Jorge Luis Borges.