[Ballantine Adult Fantasy 32] • The Man Who Was Thursday

GK Chesterton's 1908 masterpiece is an intriguing mix of thriller, farce and gothic romance.

In his 1901 essay Dreams, GK Chesterton rapturously advocates works of

literature that "present such a picture of literary chaos as might be

produced if the characters in every book from Paradise Lost to The

Pickwick Papers broke from their covers and mingled in one mad romance".

Few novels could quite match Chesterton's description but his own 1908

masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, comes admirably close. The novel

is a raucous carnival of genres: thriller, farce, detective story,

dystopia, fairy tale and gothic romance. It can be read as a

philosophical treatise or a fraught expression of religious conviction

but above all it is gloriously entertaining.

It begins conventionally enough, at a suburban garden party, but an

argument soon whisks Gabriel Syme away on a phantasmagorical romp

through London and beyond. We follow Syme – a poet-turned-detective – as

he infiltrates a group known as the Central Anarchist Council and

struggles to derail a terrorist plot. Chesterton makes a habit of

pulling the rug from under us – the quotidian perpetually morphs into

the extraordinary, the surreal turns back into the sensible. Syme begins

to feel that "the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees

were growing downwards and that all stars were under his feet".

The novel increasingly revels in the disorder of dreams. Chesterton's

great achievement is to imbue the everyday world with wonder; everything

becomes exotic and fantastical. His portrayal of London in particular

is an enchanting evocation of the modern metropolis – the city is

rendered as a psychedelic wonderland, as both an ocean and a mountain

range, as both the depths of hell and the unexplored surface of a

foreign planet.