The Man Who Was Thursday, a Nightmare

Rating:
Summary: Franz Kafka meets joy,Kafka is shocked by ulitmate evil
Review: A hundred thousand years could go by until the human race finally wakes up the fact that Gilbert Keith Chesterton is one of the great est writers of the sad and bad twentieth century along side of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, Mervyn Peake, and, of course, Franz Kafka. His psychedelic quest-romance "The Man Who Was Thursday" will shock you - if you have nerves left to be shocked. If you don't have nerves Chesterton will wave his aesthete's magic wand and create you a new pair of nerves. The book is not a roller coaster ride through phantasmgoric visions of evil and beauty. It is a quest of one man to get to that most dreadful of topics - The Bottom Of Things. The "anarchists" are everywhere, and like blasphemous termites from a world beyond they are attempting to eat away at the roots of human civilization until it crumbles in flames. I am often reminded of the sublime fictions of Thomas Pynchon while I contemplate "The Man Who Was Thursday". Chesterton, out of magic bag, throws out plenty of paranoia and devilry and fine poetical prose to keep us feeling like we are living in a grade-b version of film noir crossed with a Monty Python movie where all of the actors have sipped their daily quanta of holy water and have sworn comical oaths to the Divinity. I often wonder if Mr. Chesterton's little psychedelic surprize played any role in influencing Patrick McGoohan ( the world's most under utilized actor) when he created the monstrous television series "The Prisoner". There is the same unconventional idea that morality is a form of rebellion in both works. And Chesterton prizes human freedom at least as much as Mr. McGoohan does, though Mr. McGoohan is grim and even savage while Mr. Chesterton is almost always "gay" and humorous even at his darkest. Speaking of gay I am reminded of Franz Kafka for a number of reasons. Franz Kafka, apparently, loved the writings of Mr. Chesterton. Kafka once remarked that Chesterton was so "gay" it was almost as if he had discovered God. "The Man Who Was Thursday" should be regarded as Kafka's Rescue. Mr. Chesterton sees all of the things Mr. Kafka does but he sees both more and less. Mr. Chesterton was, of course, an aesthete. That is to say he was a man who subscribed to Theophile Gautier's idea : art for art's sake. This was a stance that Mr. Chesterton carefully concealed from himself but we can see it in his endless poetical discriptions of landscape, the physical features of characters, the psychological revelation ( "analysis" is a cold word) of characters. The Great King Chesterton was a complicated man and he gave us a subtly complicated tale. Five Stars. I would prefer seven