Inspired by Jack: The Man Who Was Thursday

or, On Reading Chesterton in a Digital Age

Dear Friends,

One thing I particularly enjoy about this new “Inspired by Jack” series is that it gives me a lot of freedom to choose what I want to read next. That’s why I haven’t posted a schedule: I’m generally trying to alternate between older books, like Phantastes, and newer books, like Piranesi, but I retain the right to change my plans according to whim and circumstance.

This week, I had fully intended to read some William Morris, one of Lewis’ longtime favourites, and write about that—and I still plan to do so before the end of the year. But I found myself, without really meaning to, picking up and re-reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday last week. So I’m going to write about that instead.

Cover of the Modern Library edition of The Man Who Was Thursday

As someone who doesn’t like suspense, I often actually like to have a plot spoiled before I read a book. But The Man Who Was Thursday is one book that even I refuse to spoil. The plot twists are marvellous, and you have to experience them for yourself.

Accordingly, it’s a bit difficult to know what to write or how much to tell you about the story. Suffice it to say, The Man Who Was Thursday is a novel about a poet who goes to a party and then has a very strange dream. Or, The Man Who Was Thursday is a novel about a detective who infiltrates a circle of anarchists. Both are true and neither are quite sufficient to the reading experience.

(As an aside: I was struck on this re-read by the parallels between The Man Who Was Thursday and That Hideous Strength. They are both, in a sense, spiritual thrillers with dream-like conclusions, both of which involve wild animals breaking free, and both of which involve elaborate costumes that express the inner spiritual realities of the main characters. It’s common to connect That Hideous Strength to Charles Williams’ influence, and I’m not contradicting that interpretation—but Chesterton is also very much present in that novel.)

The Man Who Was Thursday is subtitled “A Nightmare,” and it truly does operate on a certain dream logic, while still keeping the breathless pace and narrative coherence of a masterful thriller. Every time I read it, I puzzle afresh over whether the whole book is the nightmare, or only a part, and whether some parts are actually good dreams rather than bad. It contains moments of existential horror, and moments of what J. R. R. Tolkien called ‘eucatastrophe’—the joyous and unexpected turn of the fairy story.

It’s the sort of book that shows you something new every time you pick it up. It’s about trying to believe in God in the face of the natural world’s brutality, and also about trying to reconcile that brutality with the world’s beauty.

Those theological dimensions are always fascinating to me, but on this re-read, I was struck by another aspect of the narrative: The Man Who Was Thursday interrogates what we are willing to believe about our fellow human beings.

Without giving away any key plot twists, I can tell you that one of the book’s most memorable scenes is an extended chase across the French countryside, wherein the protagonists are trying to escape a mob allied with the anarchists. Every seemingly benevolent person our heroes pass—kindly French peasants, virtuous innkeepers, brave retired soldiers, the proverbial ‘virtuous common man’ one and all—at first assists them and then, upon encountering the mob, treacherously join in the chase.

I have always enjoyed this scene, because the atmosphere is so perfectly phantasmagoric: the flight through a strange landscape; the pursuers that slowly but inevitably gain ground; the abrupt, apparently non-rational intuitions and decisions of the characters. But it resonated with me in a new way on this read-through.

The betrayal of these apparently sympathetic characters feels to the protagonists like an existential attack: they not only believe that they are losing their fight against the anarchists, but also that they have been personally and philosophically mistaken to trust other people. Apparently kindly individuals have vanished into the mob.

Most of the heroes meet this blow with a defiant despair, concluding that anarchism has truly infected the world. But one character (whose name I will not give because… spoilers!) becomes convinced that he must be either dreaming or insane. “I may be mad, but humanity isn’t,” he insists, and he maintains that conviction to the end.

And that horrified bewilderment was what resonated with me. That question: has the world gone mad, or have I? I’d bet many of us have wondered that in recent years. It’s not even a matter of political alignment, I suspect: the sense that something has gone wrong in the world, or in other people, seems to transcend polarisation.

What do we do, in a world that’s gone mad?

Well, if we follow the example of Chesterton’s characters, we keep hoping to find the best in other people, and when we are disappointed, we keep defending the Good, whatever that might mean in our particular contexts. The Man Who Was Thursday is, in that sense, a fortifying novel.

In the book’s dedicatory poem to Edmund Clerihew Bentley (incidentally, the man who gave his name to the clerihew poetic form), Chesterton recalls a youthful discontent with the world and with British culture: “A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, / Yea a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.” But by the end of the poem, that cloud has blown past: “We have seen the city of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved— / Blessed are they who did not see but, being blind, believed.”

Believed in what, we might well ask? Perhaps, in Chesterton’s words, “God and the good Republic.” Perhaps goodness and truth and beauty. Or perhaps (and perhaps I’d better say), if we take the novel itself as an interpretive clue, believe in the fundamental decency of other human beings.

With the whole of the twentieth century to look back on, it’s difficult to share the idealism of Chesterton’s heroes. And if one has a theological commitment to the existence of human sin nature, ‘faith in humanity’ might seem a foolish formula. But I think it’s important to note that the protagonists of The Man Who Was Thursday aren’t naive. They all believe that they face a vast, superhuman evil, and they are quick to doubt those in positions of power or privilege. Their hope in human nature is a desperate hope, and their despair is a militant despair.

Even the man who declares himself mad continues to run, and continues to fight. He is simply unwilling, and his fellows reluctant, to believe the worst.

I promised in the subtitle that I would write about reading Chesterton in a digital age. So let me try to connect the dots here.

As far as I am concerned, the internet has become a nightmare realm. Human beings become their worst selves in this disembodied, artificial world. There are exceptions, of course, but can we all agree that the generalisation is sound?

It takes less than five minutes of online scrolling these days for me to become desperate and horrified, to start asking, “Has the world gone mad, or have I?” It’s so easy to find dishonesty, cruelty, and foolishness. It’s so easy to consume slop.

Tech companies extract profit by appealing to the worst of human nature. And one of their most insidious tricks is to make us feel we cannot trust our neighbours. They substitute digital and financial transactions for connection.

I’ve only realised in the past year or two how much I, as an anxiety-prone introvert, have fallen prey to this controlled, atomised, digitised way of being in the world.

Take today as an example: my kid has a nasty cough, my husband is out of the country, and I needed to buy milk. I didn’t want to haul a sick kid to the store. In bygone days, a woman in this position would have probably asked a neighbour, or family member, to watch her child while she ran the necessary errand. Or perhaps sent a neighbour to the store on her behalf. But I, who am too shy and perhaps too suspicious to ask my (lovely, friendly) neighbours to watch my kid for half an hour, opened Doordash and paid an absurd amount to have milk delivered.

And this is just one example. Think about how we travel now. I, for one, use websites to find the cheapest flights and the cheapest acceptably reviewed hotels. I check Yelp rather than ask a concierge for advice. I map my route using one or another phone app. I use Uber, which minimises uncertainty and human interaction. These processes all give me a sense of control in unfamiliar environments. And I value that a lot, especially because getting on an airplane makes me horrifically anxious, and I want to minimise variables.

But all of these tools prevent me from having to trust other people—from travel agents to hoteliers to taxi drivers to tour guides to helpful strangers on the street.

And the more I rely on these technologies, the less willing I am to trust other people. It feels inconvenient, or overwhelming, or dangerous.

Similarly, the more I take my picture of human nature from the digital realm, the less I’m willing to have faith in my neighbours, in the familiar faces I walk past every day. But a good trip—and a good life—involves connecting with those people.

It’s easy to allow the digital realm to make us worse. It’s also easy to allow the way someone speaks on the internet to form our whole picture of their character. But there’s a reason that “Talk is cheap” has become a cliche. This isn’t to say that all that talk on the internet, all that verbal ugliness, doesn’t erupt in horrific ways in our embodied lives. It absolutely does. And it’s not to dismiss the importance of courtesy in general. But I do think that the internet, which mediates presence through words and images, encourages us to reflexively dismiss people because they do not talk or look the right way, and that this is hugely socially corrosive.

I think Fredrik Backman explores this well in his novels. His characters are simultaneously well-intentioned and frequently socially maladroit. Take the protagonist of A Man Called Ove, who never has the right words to describe his Iranian neighbour or the gay young man who hangs around his street, but who can always be persuaded to help them and receives love in turn. That’s what community is supposed to be: finding grace for our failings, and helping one another however we can.

And fostering this community requires an extraordinary amount of faith these days. It involves extending trust, even in the face of profound disillusionment.

My husband was telling me the other day that his grandmother had a routine whenever a new neighbour moved in. She would bring them food, of course. But then, a few days later, she would send one of her kids to ask for an egg or a cup of flour. And that’s brilliant—because it makes you indebted to your neighbour. That debt is a show of trust, and it invites reciprocity. Next time they run out of milk, they know where to go.

The world these days makes me tired. I bet it does the same to you. The more I read old books, though, the more I think that we aren’t alone in that feeling. Chesterton had clearly felt horror and fear at the state of the world in his own day. Humans have always confronted violence and war, famine and pestilence, and often felt dwarfed by the scale of the crises confronting them. That’s why The Man Who Was Thursday feels timeless, even though we’re no longer specifically afraid of anarchists throwing dynamite.

So what do we do? Well, maybe borrow an egg from your neighbour. (Now might be the best time to do it, given the price of eggs!) Bring someone a meal. Plant a garden. Invest in an institution. Go on a walk, and smile at passersby.

None of these solve the cultural crisis, of course. But they are all ways of fighting through despair and cultivating the good—or, if you prefer, building solidarity. The best any of us can do, after all, is to live according to our values in whatever context we find ourselves. For me, that involves refusing the picture of humanity which social media encourages me to adopt.

In this regard, I love the title of Leif Enger’s recent novel, which is also about living in a world gone mad: I Cheerfully Refuse. (Highly recommend, by the way.)

Wishing you all moments of unmediated connection this week,

Sarah

P. S. I think it’s important for me to say, whenever I recommend Chesterton’s writing, that his worldview is consistently orientalising. Sometimes, like many writers of his day, he uses racial slurs. This is not the case in The Man Who Was Thursday, but it is true in some of his other books.