Synopsis
Gabriel Syme, a poet and member of the Philosophical Policemen, must combat the Supreme Council of Seven, a group of anarchists each of whom is named for a day of the week.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2001-10-01 | | Series: | Modern Library Classics |
| Size | | Length: | 198 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 6.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.
Industry Reviews
"Of supposedly serious contemporary writers, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was the first to make a strong and genuine impression on me....Even now I see something romantic, almost heroic, about Chesterton, while deploring what in those days I knew nothing of, his self-indulgent polemical writing and the whimsical playing with paradoxes so common in his later fiction....I think it was The Man Who Was Thursday that started me off....I only know that, after a surfeit of supposedly realistic accounts of the workings of espoinage organizations...I long for The Last Cursade and Gabriel Syme with his cloak and sword-stick, and wish that there were a few more books like this."
New York Times Book Review - Kingsley Amis (10/13/1968)
"'The Man Who Was Thursday' is not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but it has something of all three...It remains the most thrilling book I have ever read."
Kingsley Amis
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