The Man Who Analyzed The Man Who Was Thursday · 5:38am Jan 5th, 2018
This book was published in 1908, so I think we're a little past the statue of limitations on spoilers. But the book is amazing and I suspect most of you haven't read it, so I'm going to use Spoiler Tags to hide any major plot points I may mention. Good? Good!
That said, let's talk about a god damn amazing and book and why it inspires me to write more.
Sometimes, when reading an older book, you discover that the text is not pleasant to read -- that the English language has mutated enough since the time of publication that the writing feels inelegant and clunky.
THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art.
(...)
Even if the people were not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
This is not one of those times.
The Man Who Was Thursday is the adventure of Gabriel Syme, an undercover agent of the British police tasked with infiltrating the anarchist movement of Europe. It is in this little suburb of Saffron Park that he makes contact with one Lucian Gregory, an anarchist who everyone thinks is a harmless daft poet. But as Gregory makes clear, he is indeed a serious anarchist, and Syme soon finds himself in the middle of an anarchist cell in the heart of London.
To the left of him revolutionaries with their pistols. To his right, bomb-throwers with their dynamite. Behind him, between him and the door, are the sadists with their knives. The most dangerous men in London are all around him. And on this night, the cell has met to discuss a special matter indeed.
It seems that Thursday is dead.
"As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always."
Like most revolutionary movements, anarchists operate in cells. But while each cell may be a force unto itself, they all send representatives to meetings of greater forces, so that they can coordinate their efforts to destroy civilization. This cell's representative is known only by his codename Thursday, and with his death, it is time for them to elect his replacement.
An undercover agent could spend his entire career among the enemies of mankind and never once have so great an opportunity as this. And so Syme realizes he has no choice. He speaks. People listen.
The roar rose like the sea, the hands rose like a forest, and three minutes afterwards Mr. Gabriel Syme, of the Secret Police Service, was elected to the post of Thursday on the General Council of the Anarchists of Europe.
He must leave for his post that very night. He is given Thursday's jacket, which is now of course his jacket. He is given Thursday's flask of brandy, which is now also his. And he is given a revolver. He may need it.
A ship is waiting for him when he reaches the water. The crew does not speak, and he does not know where they are going. The night is long and cold. Then they reach their destination, and the sun rises. It is time for breakfast -- breakfast with the great anarchists of Europe.
There is Monday, thin and emaciated, with dead eyes that seem to look through a man. Tuesday, the polish dynamiter, whose patchwork clothes smelled faintly of fuses and gin. Wednesday, the aristocrat, whose desire to see the world burn stems from nothing more than boredom, and a vague curiosity about what might come next. Friday, the mad professor, whose theories of philosophy and sociology preclude the possibility of goodness in civilization. Saturday, the man without eyes, who never stops smiling and whose darkened glasses are holes in the world.
But greater than any of them, perhaps greater than all of them, is Sunday -- the mastermind of the anarchist conspiracy.
“That is his greatness. Caesar and Napoleon put all their genius into being heard of, and they were heard of. He puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not heard of. But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without feeling that Caesar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands.”
They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood.
The speech was broken off short under a vast shadow. President Sunday had risen to his feet, seeming to fill the sky above them.
The Tsar is visiting Paris soon, you see. Nearly all of the royalty of Europe will be in one building, and so it is Sunday's desire that that building should explode. Syme only has a few days to thwart the dynamite plot, but Sunday's schemes go deeper than anyone realizes.
One by one, every member of the Anarchist Council except Sunday is revealed to be a member of the secret police. None of them knew the others were undercover agents, and so they've all spent years spying on and thwarting each others' "schemes." While individual anarchist cells do exist and are a threat to people around them, there is no "great anarchist conspiracy" or broader movement. The entire thing was orchestrated by Sunday because he was amused by the idea that all the great anarchists of Europe were just police officers doing their best impression of anarchists.
That said, action and adventure aren't what make The Man Who Was Thursday great. What makes it great is that it asks a question: what is an anarchist?
Is it a man who throws bombs into crowds? Governments have done that when it suits them. Is it a man who seeks the overthrow of the ruling class? Many rebels have done just that, only to establish a new ruling class themselves. Is it a man who seeks to abolish society's oppressive, stagnant notions of right and wrong?
“And Right and Left,” said Syme with a simple eagerness, “I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”
To The Man Who Was Thursday there is one requirement to be a true anarchist: a genuine moral outrage at the very concept of one thing being held above another. You don't just want to be right, you're offended at the very notion of something being proven wrong.
I may say that disease is caused by improperly aligned chakras causing a buildup of negative energy in the body, and that is right and proper. You may say that disease is caused by germs, and that is right and proper. You can hold any opinion you like! But how dare you, how dare you suggest that your theory can be proven to be somehow "objectively better" than mine?
There is no objectivity. There is no morality, or law, or society, or science. There is only what I believe and what you believe, and if you assert yourself over me, you're oppressing me. That's what anarchy is.
In short, The Man Who Was Thursday was written 40 years before Trump was born, but in the end, it's a story about alternative facts. About living in a post-truth world, where whatever notions someone makes up are just as valid as anything else.
"We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.
The book is remarkably relevant to our time. In the later chapters, Syme expresses a fear of anarchist mobs, only for one of his companions to snort in disgust.
“Mere mobs!” repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. “So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons’ wars.”
Larger than life villains, anarchist mobs, daring chase scenes and the great dynamite plot serve as a brilliant framing device for a story that is ultimately about society. It's a message story that neither beats the reader with the message, nor hides it in some subtle metaphor you need to overthink the story to understand. Rather, the message is flawlessly woven into the narrative, helping you feel the protagonists righteousness and his belief in his cause, and guiding you towards the well earned conclusion.
I'll leave on one final note. Syme is straight up the good guy of this story. That is never in doubt. From his first introduction, we know him to be a noble and a virtuous man. Even when it appears like the anarchists might prevail and cast all of Europe into ruin, he never once considers switching over to the winning side.
And we know this because of one brilliant sentence.
There was a second thought that never came to him. It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality ... But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.
Awesome!
I'm sure that the King of Ur and his third under-gardener would both be unsurprised by the observations herein.
At one time, when I had much stronger will, I read The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. To be specific, I read *chunks* out of the massive tome. The density of the material is stunning, the sheer volumes of lies that the average Soviet citizen waded through as a matter of fact during any given day, the outright pure fakery and deceit. How they managed to make an empire run for a week, let alone a half-century is amazing. Everybody knows (or should know) the refrain he made while in prison:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?"
How easy it is for someone like us who lives in a one-bedroom flat in the States and complains about their life under capitalism to completely forget their counterparts living elbow to elbow with family in a country where you could just *vanish* without anybody saying a damned thing, for fear of them following.
The Russian governments, Tzar and otherwise, survived by having the most ruthless, murderous, *evil* people rooting out plots and plotters against them, regardless of the reality of the threat. Chesterton's gentle treatment of these may be literary beauty, but it undercuts the grim reality of the world, and the threat we must always be wary of.
Oh, and I love your analysis.
"helping you feel the protagonists righteousness and"
"helping you feel the protagonist's righteousness and"?
An interesting post about what sounds like an interesting book; thank you. :)
I have no proof that The Man Who Was Thursday was written as a satire of Conrad's The Secret Agent. For all I know, they were both reacting to the anarchist moment of the first decade of the 20th century. But it reads that way.
And I'm pretty sure that any book that's made it into the public domain has had its claim on spoilers protection expired.
The Man Who Was Thursday was my introduction to Chesterton, and remains one of my favorite books. It's one hell of a tale, on so many levels, and Chesterton takes every opportunity to play with moods and atmosphere through his evocative descriptions. (That's a really nice summation of the anarchist council, by the way!)
And yeah, with all the accusations about fake news and the replacement of facts with opinions that's going on, this is a worthwhile read for anyone. (IMO, Chesterton's always worth reading, even -- perhaps especially! -- when you flatly disagree with what he's saying!)
Also -- I can't be the only one who feels that this could be ponified with great results! "Twilight Sparkle as the Mare Who Was Thursday!"
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I am tempted.
I am so tempted.
Chesterton is timeless.
Generations of well-read people after us will read his works and interpret them according to their current reality as did generations before us.
You may also like Dostoevskiy's "Demons" (I hope the translations improve his style that is... quite horrendous at times), also a timeless book.
I grew up reading and rereading "Father Brown" first and foremost.
This quote from "The Arrow of Heaven" was quite influential in my life as I've came to understand recently (spoilers, because it spoils the story):
Father Brown struck the table so that the glasses on it rang; and they could almost fancy a ghostly echo from the mysterious chalice that still stood in the room beyond.
“No!” he cried, in a voice like a pistol-shot. “There shall be no difference. I gave you your chance of pitying the poor devil when you thought he was a common criminal. You wouldn’t listen then; you were all for private vengeance then. You were all for letting him be butchered like a wild beast without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had only got his deserts. Very well then, if Daniel Doom has got his deserts, Brander Merton has got his deserts. If that was good enough for Doom, by all that is holy it is good enough for Merton. Take your wild justice or our dull legality; but in the name of Almighty God, let there be an equal lawlessness or an equal law.”
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The whole book was summed up in one scene:
After Stalin's death lots of political prisoners were released from the Gulags en masse. But they weren't told why.
So one guy gets off the train in his hometown and his wife is there to pick him up.
"Well," he says "Stalin finally saw through it all!"
"You idiot," she says, "Stalin is dead!"
That sounds like a hilarious and fascinating book.
From what I know of genuine anarchists these days, they can't organize themselves out of a paper bag unless it's to go beat up fascists. So much less bomb throwing these days, so much more Nazi punching.
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Actually they do far more Starbucks-trashing than Nazi-punching. If a facist plot ever involves day-old scones, we're safe.
"Are you the Equestrian Ponies' Liberation Front?"
"Fucking splitters! No, we're the Ponies' Liberation Front of Equestria."
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Holy crap, I did not expect this many people to have read the book.
That's awesome! Now I need to read more of Chesteron's books.
I think it kind of comes-around again? At some point a book is so old it's assumed people have not read it and so you're free to spoiler.
You might like it, even!
4767503 Reminds me of Sir Thomas Moore (which I have NOT read, just that the bits and pieces stuck when I saw them quote elsewhere)
(snipped from A Man For All Seasons)
Alice More: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
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Close, but fundamentally different, I think.
I haven't seen the play, and I've skimmed through the text of the first act - http://veng6a.pbworks.com/w/page/8219358/The%C2%A0Complete%C2%A0Script%3A%C2%A0Act%C2%A01%20%28AMFAS%29 - so take it with the grain of salt.
The character of More in the play shares the tremedous integrity with Brown in books.
However, here's what I think differs them.
> MORE: A man should go where he won't be tempted.
Father Brown repeatedly does exactly the opposite. While in a setting like WH40K it leads to radical inquisitors' inevitable downfall, our world is not grimdark and it's absolutely believable and realistic that a character can endure temptations.
> WOLSEY (Treats it at the level of humor, mock exasperation): Yes I need a ninny in Rome! So that I can write to Cardinal Campeggio!
> MORE (Won't respond; with aesthetic distaste-not moral disapproval): It's devious.
You can't imagine Father Brown expressing aesthetic distaste without moral disapproval.
> MORE: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal not what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal.
That's a phrase that was omitted for some reason from the quite you've used.
Greatly (very, very, very much) simplifying, More character in the play comes off as a Lawful Neutral, while Brown is Neutral Good.
More sticks to law, while understanding how Henry VIII is scared of the perspective of Wars of the Roses Part 2 if he dies heirless.
Brown in my quote appeals to law as of the set of principles stemming from moral integrity and is willing to accept lawlessness as long as integrity is not compromised.
Well, in many stories, see "The Honor of Israel Gow" for an especially macabre variant.
Okay, after seeing this post I decided that I had heard about this story enough times that I needed to read it. Holy crap. That was amazing. His writing still holds up. Thanks for the recommendation.
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I know, right? It's great!