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    The Man Who Was Thursday
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    The Man Who Was Thursday
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    The Man Who Was Thursday
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Man Who Was Thursday

    Written by G.K Chesterton

    Narrated by Gildart Jackson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Set in early 1900s London, this metaphysical thriller follows undercover officer Gabriel Syme and his secret involvement with Scotland Yard’s task force that attempts to take down underground anarchists. In doing so, Syme encounters Lucian Gregory, a passionate anarchist who eventually takes him to the areas secret meeting place. From there Syme influences his peers and eventually is voted to the central council.

    While Syme attempts to destroy the council of anarchists from the inside, He only uncovers more secrets, each more mysterious than the last.

    Using many Christian allegories and themes of suffering, this classic G. K. Chesterton novel leaves listeners on the edge of their seat until the final secrets are uncovered.

    A Dreamscape Media audio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateJul 26, 2016
    ISBN9781520015194
    Author

    G.K Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

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    Reviews for The Man Who Was Thursday

    4/5

    1,388 ratings73 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A strange and startling book. At one level, a spoof of anarchism. At another level, a spoof of police efforts to infiltrate gangs and expose them. At still a deeper level, a metaphysical dream novel. The last point comes to sneak up on you, and hits you hard in the last few chapters of the book. It does well to remember the subtitle of the book, as Chesterton himself pointed out very shortly before he died.
    • 5/5
      I suspect that this dream will linger within me for years to come. The philosophical and political currents pale compared to the intrinsic visions within, the idea that the six all saw their childhood in the penultimate geography is a telling terror.
    • 4/5
      At first, I was a little unsure of what I was reading. I'd missed the subtitle 'A Nightmare'. But in a short time the tone of the book, and its brilliant humour become, more clear. In the moment comes the delight. The recruitment of those who become what they think they're supposed to oppose, in order to stop it, only to discover they all share in that task, that none of them are who they thought, and that even the real opponent is not who they assumed; the impossibility of appearances at telling the truth, and our own personal vulnerability at seeing what is true; the experience of being pursued as something you are, or might not be, when the truth of a situation is lost to opinions and perspectives and conjecture: all these are the foundation of the nightmare. There is a role we're to play in the world: what if someone confused and scuttled it, or rendered the task impossible to really discern? What if reality and God Himself were somehow disguised beyond our description, and we had no bearings among our peers left? A clever depiction, perhaps, of the horror the secular world has brought. Some spectacular quotes lie within for whomever is willing to see the truth ;-p
    • 2/5
      I simply didn’t understand this novel. From the beginning to the very end, there was almost no logic in this novel, and the ending was completely nonsensical. For starters, the character of Syme is more concerned about his Word that he gave to an anarchist than saving lives. Six different characters in this novel all think they’re working for the police against the anarchists solely on the basis of a conversation with a shadowy man that they can’t see and who has no identification. If they were truly working for the police, wouldn’t they have some official training, documents to sign, etc. Not to mention, if they were on an undercover assignment, wouldn’t they be alerted to other police that are operating on the same exact undercover assignment? Not to mention, why would you need so many police officers operating undercover to take down the same organization?The ending was a complete headscratcher. I couldn’t make heads or tails of not only the ending, but what actually happened in the novel. If you could make some sense of it, then more power to you. For me, this was a waste of my time reading it, and based on the reviews, a very overrated novel that I would recommend skipping.Carl Alves – author of Battle of the Soul
    • 4/5
      A note in the front of my paperback copy of this 1908 novel says 2/16/1967. That's when I bought it, and soon afterward I enjoyed a first reading. A few years later I reread it with the same pleasure. And then it sat in the hidden second tier of a shelf among hundreds of other books for at least four decades, until something sent me looking for it about a month ago. Amazingly, I was able to go right to it. Hurray: I haven't yet lost that store-and-retrieve connection. I'll be in trouble when I do, because there's nothing overtly systematic about my system. I usually find things by snapshot visual memory.But as to the story, all I recalled was the main setup of the plot, namely, that a man named Syme infiltrates an anarchists' cell whose members have as code names the days of the week. The anarchists set off on a mission to prevent the prevention of a planned bombing incident. Our main character plays along while trying to think of ways to foil it himself.Then, 7/8 of the way through this short (194-page) novel, it suddenly turns metaphysical. In fact, we begin to see that it has been allegorical all along, even though the fantastic element had seemed well anchored in a recognizable terrestrial reality. It has been so long since I last read this that it surprised me; so I guess what was memorable about it was less its own particulars than the fact that I enjoyed it so long ago.Now it seems to me a bit manipulative, although not crudely so, and treats of themes that I am well tired of meeting as if by ambush around shadowy corners.But this is not the fault of the book, which is unchanged--indeed, demonstrably so, for I am reading the selfsame edition that I purchased more than 40 years ago. This is one way that a book or movie or memento or landmark can be a mirror to us: if we know that it is a constant, then our altered perception of or response to it denotes a change in ourselves. In the case of this novel, I felt as if I had been conned, and yet at the same time it's hard not to feel elevated as well, even from the point in the story where the balloon goes aloft. Chesterton achieves his transformation competently and respectably, and the element of mystery still enchants.I just don't think I'll be going along with it again. There's too much left that I've never read at all.A sampling of passages that I liked:Through all this ordeal 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. (page 89)[Syme speaking] "Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front..." (page 176)The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon. (page 183)When I first listed this book in my library, I rated it five stars based on the old memory. Now I find it very hard to rate, never mind classify; but I settled on three and a half stars just to hold as consistently as possible to my own ratings values. I would still recommend this book, though, to any reader who likes to think about things from different angles.
    • 4/5
      Once the story was established, it was quite predictable, but nonetheless enjoyable. The last chapter was perplexing to me, though. Not sure how I feel about it.
    • 4/5
      Expect the unexpected.
    • 2/5
      The author's vivid descriptions of scenery and settings, as well as certain philosophy, make for memorable reading.The plot moves along with intriguing mystery and excitement, then becomes redundant and thoroughly improbable, but worse, boring.
    • 4/5
      Unique. And very, very good. While some things are clearly forseeable, the book leaves you puzzling until the end, and after (if you count what Chesterton wrote about it 30 years later). The little notes that appear during the (paper?) chase are hilarious. ("What about Martin Tupper now?" What indeed.
    • 4/5
      Loved the symbolism, disorientation, and potent dose of philosophy at the end. A goldmine of ideas in a dream narrative, but not really a thriller by today's standards.
    • 1/5
      I don't know why this book is listed as crime. There is no actual crime involved. Just a lot of hysterical policemen running around trying to arrest each other when they are all undercover. If you want to read this book start by expecting Alice in wonderland. It make about as much sense. It even references Alice a few times. It then devolves even further to some sort of religious allegory that even the author says he was pulling out if a hat. ( last couple of pages on the penguin edition I read ) In short, if you want a story that has no logic, reason or intelligent characters but is heavy on religious symbolism this is the one for you. Personally it just made my brain itch. And not in a good way.
    • 5/5
      With amazing suspense and continual anticipation, Chesterton positions the reader to the edge of their seats on a wild ride with twists, turns, and delightful encounters. It was a joy to read this work of genius. It was a shorter book. However, with the style and prose of Chesterton, it takes longer than usual. It was well worth the time and investment.
    • 4/5
      A long time ago I read several of the Father Brown mysteries. This is a less-conventional bird, but didn't live up to its billing as an unpredictable ride. This novel's genre is heralded as difficult to pin down, but it's easily categorized as Christian allegory. There's plenty of meant-to-be-fun nonsense about police versus anarchists that becomes a slog if you see the emerging pattern. Much of this tale rings less farcical in today's world. Anarchists are anything but comic when anyone with an extreme viewpoint seems abundantly prepared to inflict massive casualities to make their point. Modern perspective's wounding of this story comes to a head with the conclusion. Read as giving answer to terrorists, it's a terribly poor one. I'm not convinced it was a great answer by the allegory interpretation either, but at least more palatable.
    • 5/5
      Allegories aren't my favorite kind of stories, but this one really stands out.
    • 3/5
      Bizarre but interesting story. At first, this seems to be a straightforward suspense thriller of police versus anarchists, but as the story progresses, it gets stranger and stranger.
    • 5/5
      This is a heck of a book. Do not shelve it next to The Iron Dragon's Daughter because I think they would annihilate each other or something.
    • 4/5
      At once lapidary, rich with ideas and a farcical romp.
    • 4/5
      Warning, spoilers. I have been wanting to read this book for some time, primarily because it is universally admired. The book deserves its reputation. Chesterton is an apologist for christianity, albeit a very cogent and intelligent one. This work of fiction functions on its surface as an intriguing detective story, but ultimately is an allegory on free will. I will have to reread it several times to fully plumb its depths. Put simply, the protagonist Symes is a police detective who infiltrates an anarchist group, which ruling members are code-named after days of the week. Symes becomes Thursday. The group's leader is Sunday. A bomb-throwing assasination plot is launched in France, and in the course of attempting to thwart it, Symes discovers that all members except Sunday are in fact policemen who have infiltrated a group composed essentially of themselves. The unsolved mystery at the novel's conclusion is: Who is Sunday? The book is short, and contains some fantastical, almost Bond-like, elements: a spinning table that screws itself into a subterranean chamber; chases by motorcar and horseback; Sunday's flight mounted atop an elephant; and, Sunday's attempted escape in a hot air balloon. The images of London are almost psychedelic in their imagery. The book is a page turner and I finished it in a Saturday morning.
    • 3/5
      I do love Chesterton's writing, but this one got away from me a little bit. I had difficulty following the characters (could have been a personal problem).Gabriel Syme, poet & undercover detective, meets a man on the street, and after challenging him about his supposed anarchism, follows him to a meeting of anarchists. Somehow, Gabriel ends up being voted to the "grand council" of anarchists, all of whom are named after the days of the week. Gabriel becomes Thursday, and finds himself caught between planning a bombing and, of course, the fact that he is a policeman. The story gets more and more bizarre and convoluted, often hilarious, until towards the end, when I found it a mess.But it wasn't long, and I'm glad I read it.
    • 4/5
      Welp.

      This started off as a charming and fast-paced mystery story, and went completely fantastical/nuts by the end. Reminded me a bit of the Temptation of Saint Anthony combined with Kafka. As if PKD was plopped down in Victorian England and told to write a story before his drugs kicked in.

      I've always liked G. K. Chesteron - for distributism, for fighting eugenics, etc. As it turns out, he's also a very charming writer. I'm glad to become more acquainted with him.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed this book until I got to the end. I was expecting a straightforward mystery/thriller, and then the ending was really strange. G.K. Chesterton is hard to understand sometimes.
    • 4/5
      Both policemen and anarchists go undercover as anarchists. If there were a central message, it escaped me, but the novel contains many entaining parts.
    • 4/5
      There are so many reviews which comment on the religious allegory of this book so I will refrain from doing that, except to say I enjoyed the "dueling with the devil" scene the most. There are also many reviews that mention how weird the story gets. Agreed. Completely. This is one of those situations in a story where purpose overshadows plot because the whole thing is really quite ridiculous. In a nutshell, Gabriel Symes is an undercover detective who infiltrates an anarchist group (Council of the Seven Days) only to find that the entire membership, with the exception of its leader, is made up of undercover New Detective Corps members. Each member goes by a day of the week for an alias, hence the Council of the Seven Days. Symes has just been nominated as "Thursday". As a collective week they are all trying to get at the elusive leader, "Sunday". Except, they are all in the dark as to each others true identities. What I find curious is that when Sunday sniffs out a spy his fears are confirmed when the undercover policeman reveals he is carrying his membership card to the anti-anarchist constabulary. Wouldn't you remove that piece of evidence, especially if you bother to go through the trouble of wearing an elaborate disguise? Gogol posed as a hairy Pole, accent and all. The Professor posed as an invalid old man with a huge nose. Turns out, all six policemen are carrying the tell-tale blue identification card. Not one of them thought to leave it at home. But, I digress. For most of the story it is a cat and mouse game with the good guys chasing the bad guys (until one by one, they find out they are all good guys). The theme of "who can you trust" is ongoing.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading this startling, at times riotously funny, often gorgeously written book. The ending perplexed me, however, and that's why I ultimately dropped my rating to 4 stars. I wouldn't recommend this as anyone's first foray into Chesterton, but if you've enjoyed Orthodoxy, this is likely a good place to start with his fiction. He's a marvelous writer.
    • 3/5
      The first half of this book is amazing, wonderful and very tightly conceived but I think it loses itself a little in the second half, when they go after Sunday. It is still memorable, though, and scenes have stayed with me. The ending is odd, as I was warned, but not uncharacteristic and I think it leaves a lovely taste in the mouth.
    • 4/5
      Weird but absolutely brilliant.
    • 4/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I AM THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OF THIS REVIEW, as well as the owner of CCLaP; I am not reprinting this illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelThis week: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), by GK Chesterton#4 in this essay seriesThe story in a nutshell:Part detective tale, part absurdist comedy, The Man Who Was Thursday tells the story of poet and intellectual Gabriel Syme, living in the bohemian London neighborhood of Saffron Park at the beginning of the 20th century. Ah, but what most people don't know is that Gabriel is an undercover anti-anarchist cop as well, a "philosopher cop" who opposes the actions of blue-collar terrorists purely on ideological grounds. After striking up a friendship with Lucian Gregory, the only other political poet in Saffron Park, the other man lets Gabriel in on his little secret -- that he is actually part of a very serious underground anarchist cell himself, one that hides itself precisely by going around loudly announcing its violent intentions in public, fooling the rest of society into thinking they're a group of harmless cranky eggheads.Through a series of surreal clandestine meetings, then, Gabriel eventually enfolds himself into the group, even convincing them to eventually elect him their cell's leader; this then gets him saddled with the code name "Thursday," matching as it does the code names of the other six cells in their particular terrorist network. Ah, but as the plot thickens and the cloak-and-dagger action increases, both Gabriel and we readers learn something ironic and funny about the whole situation; turns out that there are actually more undercover cops in the anarchist cell than there are actual anarchists, all of them recruited into Scotland Yard by the same shadowy authority figure, and that they've been spending the majority of their time chasing each other instead of the actual criminals.(WARNING: The next paragraph reveals important information about the end of the book.)In fact, by the end of the story we realize that not a single member of the terrorist cell is a terrorist at all; that the entire thing was cooked up by the aforementioned Lucian, all the way down to the mysterious Scotland Yard official who recruited them all, specifically to prove to Gabriel the contention of their very first argument, that he is a "serious" anarchist who shouldn't be underestimated. In what can only be called a bizarre and nonsensical ending, then, the group chases the main leader "Sunday" across the city via elephant, hot-air balloon and other strange transportation, where eventually they are led into the English countryside and a highly symbolic, costume-laden confrontation inside a large private estate. Was it all a dream, when all is said and done? After all, Chesterton did give the book the subtitle "A Nightmare," and for the rest of his career complained about how many people didn't bother to notice.The argument for it being a classic:The biggest argument for this being a classic, I think, is that it's a great example of a small but very important time in Western literary history; the transitionary period between Romanticism and the Modern era, that is, or the years between 1900 and World War I. It was these two decades, historians argue, where such things as abstract poetry were embraced for the first time, dreamlike narratives, modern psychological theories and a lot more; sure, it wasn't until the Jazz Age when such groups as the Dadaists and Surrealists made abstract art really famous, but it was the bold experimenters of the generation before them who really set those events in motion. At the same time, though, fans say that Chesterton's work is a unique creature unto itself, and that this is also a major reason to continue reading and enjoying him; he not only laid the groundwork for a lot of modern complex "weird" literature, his fans argue (for example, Neil Gaiman is a big fan, and even based his Sandman character "Fiddler's Green" on Chesterton himself), but was also a master of smart, black humor, arresting visual images, and the notion of vast secret worlds existing among us in plain sight. And then finally, its fans argue, this book is also a nice record of a period of history becoming more obscure by the day -- the period right before the rise of organized labor, where working conditions had become so bad and with so few legitimate avenues to complain, a whole generation of poor liberal immigrants ended up taking matters into their own hands, creating a wave of domestic violence and public terror that rarely gets talked about in this country anymore. It was an issue that divided this country when it originally occurred; Thursday, its fans argue, captures the zeitgeist of that issue nicely, even if the story itself is a symbolic one that in reality has little to actually do with anarchist terrorists.The argument against:The main argument against this being a classic is one used a lot -- that it is simply too obscure to deserve the label, a historically important and personally entertaining book to be sure but not one that you can legitimately say that all people should read before they die. And indeed, if you look at the long-term reputation Chesterton has earned over the decades, you'll see that the thing which makes him so well-loved in certain circles is the same thing making so few of his books "classics" in the traditional sense; that he was a quirky writer, one who employed a self-satisfied writing style sure to turn a lot of people off, delving into philosophical topics on random whims and sometimes digressing into pure abstraction. I don't think anyone would argue that Chesterton still has a modern audience who will love him, even a hundred years after this book was first published; it's just that this is a niche crowd, just like it was when Chesterton was alive, making Thursday still relevant but not exactly a classic.My verdict:After reading the book now myself, I'm still a bit on the fence about whether it should be considered a classic. On the one hand, its critics are definitely right, that this is an unusual book that requires a certain specific type of sense of humor to really enjoy (think Monty Python), and that its ending devolves into the kind of "Twin Peaks" unexplainable weirdness that makes some people even to this day shrug and throw their hands in the air when it comes to the subject of Modernist literature. But then again, isn't it important that we understand this period of history in order to understand the much more important period that came afterwards? This is why the great transitionary periods of the arts always get short shrift -- that even as they are important for bridging two major periods of human culture together, the works actually made in those interregnums are often clunky and full of basic problems. On the one hand, a book like Thursday can be safely skipped by most general readers, in that its main strength was in laying the groundwork for the mature modern authors who came afterwards; there'd be no James Joyce, after all, without the Chestertons who got a general audience ready for them. On the other hand, though, this arguably then makes Chesterton as historically important a writer as Joyce himself, and certainly books that are easier to understand and contain a lot more sly humor. I guess, then, that I will puss out this week and not declare a general answer at all, but rather two specific ones: that Thursday should be considered a classic by those who read older books more for the historical sense of continuance they provide, but not by those who read older books just for random pleasure. In either case, though, it's definitely a fun and fast little novel that I recommend just for sheer entertainment, especially to those who enjoy other projects that combine fantastical genre elements with witty pessimistic humor.Is it a classic? Kinda
    • 4/5
      Unusual. A book that suprised me to the very end. That hasn't happened in a long time. Allegorical detective story where evil unmasked from goodness @ the end of a "normal" detective story is completely reversed when good is unmasked from an evil person.The man who was Thursday is a Scotland Yard detective that infiltrates the grand European Council of Anachists. It is revealed, eventually, that all the members on the council are undercover policemen. There is order instead of anarchy and, Sunday, president of the council is the same man that sent the undercover detectives on their mission. There is only one anarchist character. There is much Christian allegory and the annotated edition by Martin Gardner, from Ignatius Press is helpful. Not sure I still understand it. A healthy challange.
    • 4/5
      Levity with a purpose is how I might describe the overall feel of The Man Who Was Thursday. Chesterton creates a tangle of wonderful characters fighting out order vs. anarchy without really knowing who is on which side, and although the prose is light and the dialogue is clever, the allegory certainly has serious things to say to the reader.
    • 1/5
      I was really prepared to love this, but couldn't. The story it's self is wonderful, but I could not get past the narration. Plodding, monotonous...this narrator leant nothing to this work.