ugh it appears that a few reviewers went to the length of reading
the whole of _The Man who was Thursday_ (1908), it is obvious by their
subsequent guesswork that they did not notice the second part of the
title, which is, very simply, _A Nightmare_. The story takes its name
from the Supreme Council of Anarchists, which has seven members, named
after the days of the week. Sunday is the Chairman. The others, one
after the other, turn out to be detectives. Syme, the nearest approach
to the what might be called the hero, is a poet whom mysterious hands
thrust into an Anarchists' meeting, at which he is elected to fill the
vacancy caused by the death of last Thursday. A little earlier other
mysterious hands had taken him into a dark room in Scotland Yard where
the voice of an unseen man had told him that henceforth he was a member
of the anti-anarchist corps, a new body which was to deal with the new
anarchists--not the comparatively harmless people who threw bombs, but
the intellectual anarchist. "We say that the most dangerous criminal now
is the entirely lawless modern philosopher," somebody explains to him.
The bewildered Syme walks straight into further bewilderments, as, one
after the other, the week-days of the committee are revealed. But who is
Sunday? Chesterton makes no reply. It was he who in a darkened room of
Scotland Yard had enrolled the detectives. He is the Nightmare of the
story. The first few chapters are perfectly straightforward, and
lifelike to the extent of describing personal details in a somewhat
exceptional manner for Chesterton. But, gradually, wilder and wilder
things begin to happen--until, at last, Syme wakes up.

The trouble about _The Man who was Thursday_ is not its
incomprehensibility, but its author's gradual decline of interest in the
book as it lengthened out. It begins excellently. There is real humour
and a good deal of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there are
passages like this one on the "lawless modern philosopher":

Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are
essentially moral men; my heart goes out to
them. . . . Thieves respect property. They merely
wish the property to become their property that
they may more perfectly respect it. But
philosophers dislike property as property; they
wish to destroy the very idea of personal
possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they
would not g