Modern writers are hemmed in by labels, by genres, by boundaries beyond which we are never supposed to travel. Crime writers write crime, thriller writers thrillers, those of us fixed in a specific geographical location must never cross foreign borders. How we should envy our predecessors. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson, able to pen <em>Treasure Island,</em> <em>Kidnapped</em> and <em>Jekyll and Hyde</em> without having someone yell, 'Hang on. What does this bloke think he is? A kid's author? A writer of adventure stories? Or a horror writer?'

O lucky man. Here's <em><a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3680" target="_blank">The Man Who Was Thursday</a>,</em> an extreme oddity from G.K. Chesterton, better known for gentle Father Brown detective stories though they are but a small part of his prodigious output of novels, journalism, poetry and non-fiction work. Chesterton hobnobbed with George Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc among others and was fond of a friendly public spat from time to time. A very large man, fond of food and carrying a swordstick and revolver from time to time, he was also celebrated as a witty chap. Once when a woman came up to him during the First World War and asked why he wasn't 'at the Front' he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.'

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Chesterton had his dark side. He dabbled in the occult as a young man in a London where such experiments were not uncommon. Later he converted to Roman Catholicism. Christianity runs throughout his work and is evident in <em>The Man Who Was Thursday.</em> But don't think it's some serious, heavy tome. <em>Thursday</em> is an extraordinarily adventurous work, first published in 1908, combining a surreal view of contemporary London and a strange story, half spy and detective tale, about the infiltration of an anarchist gang. Anarchists were the common enemy at the time in the West (communism had yet to raise its head).

In the guise of a conventional battle of wits Chesterton lays out the argument between order and chaos and sets the scene for a battle, on the surface, between the forces of light and darkness, not that anything is quite that simple, of course. Lucian Gregory, the anarchist poet, sums up the conflict early on...
<blockquote>"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless police- men. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."</blockquote>
Cue an extraordinary narrative involving the seven men who sit on the anarchists' council, each of them named after a day of the week, and at odds with one another and the world itself. <em>Fantasy: The 100 Best Books,</em> edited by Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, describes this work as, 'one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges.'

The writing style feels a little antiquated now if I'm honest but that doesn’t take away from the brave originality of the work, or the plain fact that if one of us tried something like this today we'd probably have our agents and editors shrieking to the stars.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/chesterton-the-man-who-was-thursday-a-nightmare.pdfblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Chesterton-The-Man-Who-Was-Thursday-a-Nightmare-.pdf">Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday- a Nightmare</a>

As usual a pdf is above, click the link at the top to Feedbooks for other formats.