Review: The Man Who Was Thursday
I am a sucker for conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality art. I’m willing to die on the hill that conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality is a genre based on the number of works that fit the bill that I’ve read.
This is Chesterton’s take on it, set in the early 1900’s. I mention the time, because like so many of these, he draws the reader into the web by using plenty of contemporaneous references that slowly melt into universal tropes. Since I didn’t live in the nineteen aughts, these are historical references to me. I like the feeling that Chesterton was pulling his readers in with pop star references.
Because this kind of book is deliberately twisty to make the reader look at reality differently, I won’t try to explain much of the plot. It’s a good run at the genre and has some nice revelations. I think it’s probably sound enough that it would read and confound modern readers of this era’s fiction.
Recommended.