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Showing posts with label Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent. Show all posts

Friday 13 August 2021

Review: G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

 


To put it briefly, No.

Late in life, G K Chesterton drew attention to the sub-title of this novel, A Nightmare, and it’s true that its phantasmagoria of chases and pursuits which play fast and loose with time and space can best be understood in terms of the kinds of thing which happen in dreams. But that doesn’t solve the problem that the overall effect is that of something whimsical and silly, with some cod symbolism/philosophy/theology thrown in at the end in an attempt to redeem it.

This 1908 book does have one foot in the real world. Like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) - a very good novel - it picks up and makes plot-line use of the fact that contemporary anarchist and other revolutionary groupings across Europe were heavily infiltrated and even controlled by secret policemen, notably by agents of the Tsarist Okhrana created in 1881. Chesterton’s story line amounts to not much more than the successive (and rather laborious) revelation that six out of seven members of an anarchist central committee are all policemen, and very British policemen too.

It’s a short book and I made myself read it all. There are occasional thoughts which resonate, as when Conrad (authorially) writes, “ The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” - aptly illustrated in our own time by the super-rich who back Mr Trump and Mr Johnson and for whom laws, like taxes, are for the little people.

But, still, No. It wasn’t worth a couple of my evenings.