2018 read #9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5

I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:

"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 [source of concern]. 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 been objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats are always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' war."

The true menace of Trumpism, one might say, would lie in the coup scored by the rich in getting the (white) working classes to embrace and worship a particularly kleptocratic form of anarchism that undermines the very government the working classes rely upon. Chesterton's insight here has current resonance, even though one gets the impression that the nebulous "aristocrats" he has in mind align more with the 21st century fantasies of George Soros using his wealth to suborn family, religion, and duty, rather than the actual oligarchic catastrophe sweeping the planet.

Some substantial spoilers ahead.

I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.

And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.