Yesterday I read The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, written in 1908. This is a crazy book about a policeman seeking to stop an anarchist cell from murdering the Russian Czar and setting off the overthrow of government and civilized life everywhere. The symbolism is deeply religious and the fight clearly drawn between conservatism and liberalism (the good guys are the conservatives). And yet the book is completely readable and entertaining and thought-provoking because Chesterton writes well. He mixes great deadpan humor with absolute slapstick and throws in plenty of pondering about meaning of life and other heavy stuff. He also has enough plot twists to make a reader dizzy; perhaps he tries to use the dizziness to scare us away from the anarchy he reviles.
We have to remember that in the time when Chesterton wrote anarchists were very visible and active, having recently killed Czar Alexander II of Russia, the empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Sadi Carnot of France, the prime minister of Spain, and King Umberto I of Italy. Anarchy was not living in a crummy house and going through trash for food; it was violent overthrow of governments, what we today call terrorism. Taking the book from its placement in a pre-car, pre-phone, pre-World War history and reading it from a post 9/11 viewpoint, turns it into a pretty scary book. Does the parallel continue to work when we consider how Chesterton portrays the fighters against anarchy? They are intelligent enough on their own but bumbling fools when they are together. You decide if the novel reflects our times and the “fight against terrorism.”
Chesterton is known today for his maxims and the book is full of great quotes. For example, Through all this his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy. Now that is true, very true, but also really funny. And even more true and funny when you have one child and then decide to have another one: you do not then have two children, you literally have two thousand times the laundry, the food on the floor, the trips to the grocery store, and the minutes it takes for bedtime to finally arrive.
But Chesterton is not interested in children: he is interested in souls and the saving of them from the perils of chaos. He makes a good argument for the fight against anarchy (and terrorists) by writing a truly anarchic (crazy) book.
