I do think I would have liked this more in print, which would have allowed me to think through the images and ideas a bit more. The audio production, read by Simon Vance, was well done, with the exception of the overlong tracks. There are some wonderfully surreal bits toward the end that I just enjoyed as word pictures, even if I didn’t understand what Chesterton was doing. I enjoyed how twisty it was and how it took me places that I didn’t expect (although one particular series of twists became obvious to me before it did to Syme). On balance, though, I did enjoy the book. If I’d had the book in print, I could have pondered individual moments as much as I wanted. Most tracks were around 10 minutes, and there were several times when I wanted to backtrack when I was 8 minutes in, just to listen to a paragraph or two again. I listened to several sections multiple times, but I would have liked to just ponder specific paragraphs, which is not a viable option with audiobooks, especially in an audiobook with long tracks, like this one. I could just about wrap my brain about some of the ideas Chesterton was getting at, but the story would always move on before I could quite get there. This is not, however, a straightforward Christian allegory-or if it is, it’s too subtle for me. Locations and identities shift in unexpected ways, just as they do in dreams.Ĭhesterton was a Christian, and the nightmare he concocted is infused with Biblical imagery. And Syme seems to be living a nightmare in which nothing is what it seems. I think perhaps most nightmares are only scary to the person who dreams them.

To say that the novel develops a nightmarish quality is not to say that it’s scary. Eventually, though, the story gets more a more surreal, and I realized that the subtitle “A Nightmare” is as significant as the main title.

There are double-crosses, dynamite plots, and secret identities revealed. Overseeing the group is the mysterious Sunday, a man whose very presence instills in Syme a sense of dread and fear.įor quite a while the story moves along much in the way that I expected. Each of the men on the governing council of the anarchist group (yes, the anarchists believe in some sort of order) has taken on the name of a day of the week, and Syme manages to worm his way onto the governing council as their new Thursday. In the opening chapters, a London man named Gabriel Syme finds himself going undercover in an organization of anarchists. I had the vague notion that it involved spies, but that’s all I knew.Īt first, it did seem like a typical spy novel. Chesterton’s most famous novel, and I’ve wanted to read more Chesterton (aside from Orthodoxy and some of the Father Brown stories, which I’ve already read). Do you ever have books on your TBR list that you know next to nothing about? I’ve had The Man Who Was Thursday on my list for years, for the sole reason that it’s G.K.

The man who was thursday a nightmare