Fred's Book Club: Throwback Thursday.

The new Joker movie has been getting lots of accolades, but I don't particularly want to see it. Some people are calling it subversive. I can only approve of subversion in a true dictatorship, and even then I can never approve of the idea of someone killing for fun and glory. To hell with that, to the hell it came from. We saw it 18 years ago today, in spades.

Which is why this week's Fred's Book Club focuses on one of my all-time favorite novels,  rare in that I've read it more than twice, and every time through I love it even more. I mean G. K. Chesterton's thrilling, baffling, and wonderful The Man Who Was Thursday, first published in 1908.

My wife finds Chesterton a tough read, even though he never wrote long (my Penguin edition comes in at 184 pages), but I know what she means. He's an English writer of very contemporary observations, meaning that his universal focus is tied to the commonplace, that is, England of 111 years ago. He assumes his audience will understand all his references, but of course we don't. Even a simple word like "suburb" is rather different to a modern American than it was to him, let alone his comments on particular neighborhoods in the city of London that have changed tremendously. Furthermore, he was a philosophical writer, which means that a lot of what he notices are interior to the main character's point of view, which sometimes requires work to understand. He either grabs you and convinces you to follow him or not. Either way, this novel is a ripping good yarn.

What's the story behind that fantastic title? Without giving too much away: Our hero, Gabriel Syme (who looks a lot like that portrait of Herbert Everett used for the above edition), is enticed by a devilish modern to join his cause -- that cause being anarchy, the terrorist mission of 1908. Their secret headquarters is packed to the rafters with bombs and guns, and they are eager to destroy everything and remake the world. The anarchists are led by seven men, each code-named for a day of the week, and the leader is Sunday. Syme decides he must infiltrate the group, becoming the man who is called Thursday.

And then it really becomes strange.

The book's subtitle is A Nightmare, and indeed it has many nightmarish aspects; time and space are distorted; villains wear strange disguises; weather changes in unnatural ways; getaways are made with balloons and elephants.

The edition I have features a brief introduction by Kingsley Amis, which surprised me when I bought it, Chesterton having been a fearless Catholic convert and Amis a notorious God-hater. And yet Amis loved the book, calling it "the most thrilling book I have ever read."

Syme is a terrific adventure hero, ready to face every kind of danger, but human all the same. At one point he realizes the only way to stop a plot is to deliver a mortal insult to the wicked Marquis, a superior swordsman who will be bound to duel him, and Syme just hopes to prevent his own death long enough to stop the plot. The duel begins, and:

... he found himself in the presence of the great fact of the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices, and had woke up on the morning when he was to be hanged. For as soon as he had seen the sunlight run down the channel of his foe’s foreshortened blade, and as soon as he had felt the two tongues of steel touch, vibrating like two living things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter, and that probably his last hour had come.
     He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the sky-line. He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.

You can read the book for free at this link, thanks to the noble volunteers of Project Gutenberg. Or you can get the Penguin edition. I like the one I have, with the Amis introduction and an article excerpt at the back from Chesterton about the novel, but I'm not too sure about the current Penguin edition. It has an introduction by author Matt Beaumont, who seems to be another bad fit for the project. He is also credited with "editing" the book. I should hate to see what a modern author would do to "edit" a book from 1908, and I fear the worst.

Living with the shadow of Islamic terrorism still stalking the world 18 years after 9/11, and with masked idiots running with impunity on our streets as some sort of fascist anti-fascists (a neat trick if you can pull it off), not to mention a popular culture that loves killers and bombers, we probably need a book like The Man Who Was Thursday now as much as ever. It's a crazy, wild, even hallucinogenic book, but in classic Chestertonian paradox, its nightmarish insanity brings us a stiff dose of clarity.

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P.S.: I suppose one possible benefit of the Joker movie is that the black-masked know-nothings who are disturbing the peace might be inspired to start dressing like clowns, an outfit that would be far closer to their true natures.