This one comes to us from the mind of Sharon (thanks, Sharon!): Man Who Was Thursday by
G. K. Chesterton.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Perhaps best-known to the general public for his Father Brown detective series, G. K. Chesterton was renowned for his wit, rhetorical brilliance, and talent for ingenious paradox. Those qualities are lavishly displayed in this funny, fast-paced novel about a club of anarchists in turn-of-the-twentieth-century London. Ostensibly a story of mystery and espionage, it's also--on a deeper level--a vehicle for social, religious, and philosophical commentary.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
This book sounds great! I love mysteries, and if the mystery helps stretch my brain a bit--so much the better. My brain is in need of stretching. Maybe I'll get on the ball and try to read the book on time.
Wynne, how are things with your? How's the big bonny boy?
Elisa
Okay, this comment (novella?) will contain spoilers, so stop here if you're still reading the book.
This is now one of my favorite books. I always hate having to defend myself when I say something gushy like that, but I will try: firstly, I loved the nightmarish quality -- the tottering, decrepit Professor mysteriously appearing around every corner, the grotesque quirks of each member of the Council of Anarchists, the sinister band of masked men moving as one. I'm an Alice in Wonderland fan so that sur-reality (is that a word?) was delightful. And the humor was fabulous. Normally when you read a book that's a hundred years old you expect to have to code-switch and really concentrate in order to get the jokes. I felt like some of the funny stuff could have been written yesterday. I especially loved how Syme picked the fight with the Marquis in the cafe and how the fake Professor mocked the unintelligible scholarly speech of the true Professor: "You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe." Alice would be proud of such exquisite nonsense.
But the real stunner was how the author makes you think you know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are, and then switches on you again and again. And even more than good and bad GUYS -- good and bad IDEAS. And then finally showing how good and bad, order and chaos, are interdependent -- how one could not exist without the other. My one complaint about The Master and Margarita was that it seemed to be a bit reluctant to be overtly religious -- it wanted to be moral but stop short of truly religious. I think I may have finally found a non-depressing, non-glib piece of religious literature that I can love with all my might. The paragraph where Syme realizes why a dandelion has to fight the whole universe was especially moving, powerful. I may have to sneak it into my next Sacrament Meeting talk. If others can quote miserable doggerel verse, I can quote G.K. Chesterton, by golly!
And that last scene, where Syme is walking and happens upon the red-haired sister of the pseudo-devil Gregory picking flowers -- I guess that was supposed to be a sort of an Adam and Eve and Satan in the Garden moment? I've never read a non-Mormon book that gave a positive spin to the chaos of the Fall, and so the ending was startling. The order-loving Syme, walking with the anarchy-loving Gregory, and happening upon the sister, who is of both minds and will help Syme take the necessary plunge out of his tidy world? Woman as the crucial catalyst that brings order and chaos together? I hope some of you guys will finish this one -- I"m all full of questions and inklings (especially the strange notes that Sunday throws to each member of the Council at the end). I need someone to hash it out with me.
Thanks to Sharon's mom and brother for letting us know this was a good one. Good and SHORT. Unlike this posting.
Woe is me. I have been abandoned in cyberspace. All I hear is the beating of my cyber-heart and the chirping of the cyber-crickets.
Wynne?
Elisa?
Sharon?
Anybody???
(sniffle)
You'll have to forgive me, Marie. See, I haven't finished the book yet--I have been a bit busy reading other books such as "How to Toilet-Train in a Day" and then "How to Clean Practically Anything"--but I hope soon to finish these and return to the joy of reading simply for fun. I couldn't even read your entry!
But soon...soon...
And now...oh crap. It's September, isn't it? Which means it's time for another book. @#$@#$!!!
Okay, Marie--I just finished it. Just five minutes ago. And...well, it was a fun ride, wasn't it?
All I can say is that I am intensely relieved that the book ended in such a good place--starting off with Gregory and Syme arguing such extremist points of views about things like "anarchy" and "order" made me roll my eyes and think back to dorks in high school...I was horribly afraid this was going to bore me to death. For about the first 20 pages--until Syme tells Gregory that he is a police officer. then it gets fun.
I think, though, that anything deep and meaningful in this book slipped me by--I've been watching too many episodes of "Barney," I suppose--and until I reached the very end when they reached Sunday's house with the ball, I rather thought that you could read this book for deep meaning, or just scratch it and take the whole thing as a lark. Which I did until the end. Really, it was silly.
So I have nothing perceptive to say about the book (and yet, I can still ramble on forever) except that I really liked Syme and his insanity, and Bull and his optimism.
Well, you're right -- it WAS a caper until the very end. Goofy, and with more caricatures than 3-D characters. That's probably why I liked it -- I'm a sucker for crazy stuff, funny stuff. It kind of put all the Big Important Issues of mankind (I kept thinking about all our modern hubub about Terrorists and the War on Terror) into a humorous light and a cosmic perspective at the same time. It acknowledges the turmoil that the hubub causes in us, but then backs up and sets it in a wider frame, with a god who is both playful and serious, anarchic and orderly. So I got to have my fun, intrigue, men in black masks, etc. and then have Meaning slapped on it at the end. It's literature for those of us who want to think Big Thoughts -- just not on every darn page of a book, for pete's sake. :)
Sharon and I went on our nightly walk last yesterday and hashed out some of our differences on the book, but here's my response for the record.
I didn't have trouble getting into the book, even though that's often a problem for me. The description of the wacky little London neighborhood with its oddball residents was just my thing, and I enjoyed the debate about whether it is more poetic and beautiful for the train to Victoria Station to arrive at Victoria, defying the chaos of the the universe, or for it to unexpectedly land you at a different station. And whether a poet's driving impulse is to celebrate anarchy or to impose order on reality. It was such a clever take on an otherwise dry subject that I really enjoyed it and became invested in arriving at an answer.
As for the end, I agree with Sharon that learning that Sunday is God is disturbing -- that he is the orchstrator not only of order but of chaos; that he is not only loving, but also capricious. However, I still like the book, because it approaches the God I believe in better than a lot of Christian literature I've read. He's closer to the Mormon conception of God as one who gave Adam and Eve conflicting commandments related to order and chaos. His ultimate goal is to restore order, but in order to accomplish his purposes, he had to nudge his children toward an interlude of chaos. That the appearance of chaos wasn't just a cosmic accident brought about by Eve's weaknesses, but a planned-for step. Having the God figure be huge and frightening, for me, was just a metaphor for what it's like to accept the fact that the fear and uncertainty we feel in life are not against God's will, though he often does offer some comfort and relief. That while this time of limbo and chaos will eventually be completely overcome by God, they are essential to his program for us in the present and that when you pray to him, you have to somehow love him in spite of your realization that the Goodness and Love that he embodies is not the goodness and love that your limited, pain-fearing, chaos-fearing human mind had previously conceived of. So looking at the book as a novel and not as a bit of religious philosophy, I grant that it's hard to so quickly switch my conception of Sunday from dark, ugly, and frightening to wondrous and loving, but it's not too different from the wrestling matches I've had with God. I think the end resolved a bit too quickly (too little time devoted to the second vision of Sunday), but the transition itself wasn't so bad in my view.
As for the life-as-a-test issue, I've been reading Paul's epistles lately, and it's hard to get very far away from that idea from a Christian standpoint. As far as your soul goes, you're not here just to have it tested, but to build it in ways that will endure beyond life. And when it comes to relationships with God or with other people, you also get to "take it with you." But we fool ourselves that other things we do in the world are of value. Your job working for a nonprofit organization that rescues kittens from trees or dismantles land mines or warns earthlings of incoming asteroids isn't of any Real Value except as it makes you a better human being or enables others to become better human beings. So again there's that wrestle to see God as benevolent even though he's put you in a situation where you spend the bulk of your life doing things (going to work, changing diapers) that have no inherent eternal value except as you allow them to push forward your spiritual progress. And that's what you see at the end of the book. All their efforts at averting disaster turned out to be pointless as far as preventing a bomb from going off, but extremely useful in cementing their characters. Not just proving to some Deity what was already in their characters, as if He didn't already know, but building, improving their characters and teaching them about the universe. So according to G.K. Chesterton (and according to Paul) it's a "test" in some ways that irritate us, but not really a test, because a test by definition exists just to see what we already are, not to give us more.
Sorry to ramble and get all churchy. Concision requires more time than word-vomiting, and I've already spent too much time book-clubbing when I should be working!
Umm...
(madly scrambling for her copy of the book to find that she had returned it that morning)
@#$@#!!
I was trying to figure out just what you two were discussing, because I'm not entirely sure that I saw the same thing in the ending...I have a faulty memory, though, and I no longer have the book to peek and see, so excuse me if I miss the point.
First of all, I wasn't weirded out by Sunday being God at all. Seems to me that he was always just what he was, and it was a character's perceptions that made him appear to be evil. All that Syme really saw was something… (for the lack of a better word) bigger than himself and outside of his realm of understanding. When expecting him to be evil (as Sunday) he attributed all that greatness to evil--and to the man in the dark room, genius. (And right from the first appearance of Sunday I knew that the man in the dark room and Sunday were one and the same, because they were both described as, well, large.) And it's not unusual for a person to think of God as a tormentor until you get to know Him a bit better...
As far as the test-thing...I don't even remember what Sunday told them at the end, honestly. (Drat book being gone!) I only remember that some of the Days weren’t very happy about it, like Monday. But...the idea doesn't bother me. The world only seems chaotic if you look at it from a mortal perspective, I figure. From where God is, it all makes sense. There isn't an ounce of suffering that is wasted: it's all lovingly designed to bring us back to him, every bit, and for every person. So there is purpose, and there is purpose in what Sunday did in this book. Just not the purpose that the characters were expecting. And this makes sense to me, so much so that I didn’t blink. I mean, really. How much will we have to experience in this life before we can see the face of God and *recognize* what we’re seeing? A lot, I think.
I mean, there's too much pain in the world, and too much horror--it had damn well better make sense to somebody, and it had better mean something! And so, to me, it must.
And now I am thinking that I entirely missed the point of the previous discussion. Probably. *sigh* I really wish I hadn’t returned that book quite yet!
Post a Comment