February 4, 2025 • 29 mins
To save the world you must be first willing to burn it.
'The Man Who Was Thursday' by G.K. Chesterton is a short fictional novel of a policeman who joins a 7 person high ranking cabal of anarchists to stop their evil ideology. He begins to learn that their are allies amongst the enemies & enlists their help to take down the behemoth ringleader Sunday. It's set in 1900's England and has a rather bizarre 'absurdist' style but with a levity you wouldn't find in other similar books.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:58) Themes/Questions
(00:14:51) Author & Extras
(00:22:35) Summary
(00:25:46) Value 4 Value
(00:28:10) Join Live!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
To save the world, you must be first willing to burn it.
Welcome
everyone to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 02/05/2025.
(00:21):
Now as you might surmise, this is the podcast where I unleash my anarchic fury on the book establishment
elite.
Okay. No. I won't be doing that today. But I will be talking about this book here that we have, The Man Who Was Thursday by g k Chesterton.
So this book was published in nineteen o eight, a hundred and seventy eight pages in length. Took me probably two to three hours reading because it is a rather short novel. It's don't doesn't take too long to really get through, and it is fun, which means you will, actually probably get through it a bit quicker than you normally will. So this is a short fictional novel of a policeman who joins a seven person
(00:58):
high cabal ranking system of anarchists
anarchists
who are applauding to take down the world, basically.
And he wants to stop their evil ideology. So he enters in disguise as a as a policeman, but pretending to be an anarchist as well. I'm gonna be struggling with that word a lot, I imagine.
And he begins to learn that there are actually some allies,
(01:19):
amongst him in this this seven person cabal. And so he's enlisting their help to take down the ringleader, the big the big kahuna himself.
And it's set in 1900
nineteen hundreds England, has a bizarre
feel to it, absurdist style, but with a levity that I I don't think you'll find in some other works which is similar to this, and we'll get on to that at the at the very end.
(01:43):
15 chapters in total, and they all have rather unique names. So the two poets of Saffron Park, the secret of Gabriel Simon, the tale of a detective, the exposure, the man in spectacles, the jewel, the criminals chase the police, etcetera, etcetera. It goes on and on.
So let's jump into the themes and some questions for today.
And they're gonna be centered around paradox, which is a favorite of mine. I love talking about paradox. Find it fascinating,
(02:08):
but in particular, why it emerges
within people and in particular,
how people can become
what they say that they hate or that they're fighting against.
What what is it that people actually fear and why do they fear it? Paradoxically,
sometimes fear can cause itself or that good things can cause fear.
And how do we even know what we're we're fearful of? So we start the book with with Syme. This is the the detective, and it's a banger of a start. I really, really enjoyed the start of this book. The first probably like 20 pages just drew me in instantly.
(02:42):
And what we see with him is,
it's you get this huge payoff of of this tension of the setting up of the tension of of what's gonna happen with this book because
very quickly, we see this
sneaky underhanded thing where he infiltrates the the anarchists. He gets elected
very sneakily as well using
(03:03):
great oratory manners
to get elected to the council.
And he then joins the council, and and we're set up with this this big enemy,
the the main, ringlander,
who is named Sunday.
And
all the people in this cabal, the seven people,
they're all named after a day of the week, hence why he is the man who was Thursday. So we see his motivations, his upbringing
(03:28):
as a child
of what led him to fight against anarchy so, so strongly,
why
he joined the police, how he joined the police in a rather fortunate manner.
And it really sets up the book nicely in terms of the motivation of this character.
And I think it it starts off it while still silly at the start, it's
(03:51):
it has this chance to become a a more serious novel at a certain point, probably within the like the first twenty pages where it's like, okay, this this could actually be like, you know, there's a gripping tension when the first,
policemen
on the other policemen on the
cabal meeting gets exposed, it could have been him. And you're like, geez, this could turn into like a serious, dangerous situation or things like this. So on the serious side of things,
(04:17):
I think there is a deep truth to this idea of the intellectual criminal
why Syme was fighting so hard against anarchy.
And it's it's because,
you know, suffering is is rather hard to quantify.
And when you have things like white collar crime, which is
causing, you know, fraud,
financial suffering
(04:38):
of underhanded dealings
of where it's very hard to improve and approve intent
of
where there's no
real physical evidence of the crime. It's it's somewhat of a he said, she said sort of thing.
There's a lot of suffering there, but it's hard to quantify and put a responsibility to when companies
(05:00):
explode or implode or there is,
you know, underhanded dealings of stock markets and things like this,
versus the real simple stuff of, you know, criminals who murder someone in a crime of passion, of thief, thievery, of stealing physical objects and things like this.
And we certainly see that some of the recent villains, some of the most evil people in history
(05:24):
have been those ones who you would almost call white collar criminals in a sense. And I'm talking of the the Lenon's, the Stalin's, the Pol Pot's,
these these people who
whilst they you could say
they they thought they were doing good, they're actually doing a lot of bad.
And there was not anarchy. You know, those those that I listed were communist, but
(05:47):
there was this,
they believe themselves beyond morals in some sort of ways. They they ended up becoming what they they said they hated, which was, you know, the powerful elite who don't care about people and who, you know, suppressing the plebs and things like this. And they ended up becoming what what they hated.
It's funny in many ways I would I would trust the fate of Australia to a bitter murderer
(06:13):
rather than a bitter anarchist, for example,
because what we start to see with these people is that they they become what they hate. And
I guess going back to the book onto the more silly side of things,
the book doesn't go down this route of of really explaining
anarchy, why Simon is so against it, why he thinks this ideology is,
(06:35):
is going to ruin the world, essentially, why it why it's more evil than perhaps someone who murders people, for example.
No. It it goes down the silly side. So we see him dive into this nest of rats, this den of vipers, if you will.
And
as he
progresses through, the plot thickens and we realize, okay, a lot of these anarchists are actually policemen
(06:58):
in disguise, much like he is to infiltrate infiltrate this cabal.
And
as he
recruits more allies to the cause, as he is,
you know, trying to stop their plots of of bombings and things like this, of of murdering
influential
people,
he realizes, well, he doesn't realize we see that he's actually causing a lot of chaos himself. So we see there's this random chase with the professor one of the other
(07:27):
days of the week who we learn is actually a policeman.
The second policeman we learn of,
where they're just like straight up running through the streets and and
going crazy.
We see the jewel outside of a a train station where he essentially confronts a man
and, you know, sets up this jewel. We see a crazy motor
(07:49):
foot chase turned to motor chase
with a large crowd of, you know, driving through streets of requisitioning vehicles, of
enlisting help, of getting down to the beach to fight to the death and fight for their cause,
which turns out to be a big misunderstanding.
And finally, the wackiest craziest stuff is the the final chase of Sunday,
(08:12):
where
there's
a an attempt to apprehend Sunday,
and it turns into massive once again chase through the streets,
chaos,
elephants get involved, hot air balloons get involved.
It becomes madness. And so even though he is against anarchy and he is for order and rules and things like this, we see in his actions and the actions of these other policemen
(08:37):
that, you know what, they're actually causing a lot of anarchy. Like, there's a lot of chaos going on here.
I would describe Syme as a relatively
introspective sort of person.
He has a very clear reason
reason for his actions, why
and philosophy of why he's fighting against anarchy.
And
he also spent the time into, I guess,
(08:58):
deciphering
why he is against these and looking at himself.
The other police, not so much. Some of them were just an actor who fell into the role of of fighting against this,
of this person of of anarchy.
So some of the others that their reasonings for getting into the business was a little bit iffy and seems just precarious. So just just a whim at the moment. So we'll put them to the side and really focus on time here
(09:25):
in terms of this aspect of becoming what he what he hates in some sort of sense. And,
you know, why does he engage in behavior that is contradict contradictory
to a stated aims
of preserving peace of,
you know, keeping the streets safe for people of
not
allowing people to just follow their whims and to
(09:49):
create disorder and things like this.
It's not for the greater good, which is typically what you'll see in cases like this where
this is where I imagine
the Stalin's of the world, they would say, like, yeah, we need to break some eggs to make an omelette sort of deal. Sure. We need to some press
the the cool locks, for example. But
this is for the greater good to make the, you know, yes, we have to kill some people. Well, sure, starve a couple of million people, but, you know, it's all for the greater good sort of thing. There's none of that rationalization
(10:21):
going on here because the thought doesn't cross his mind. It's almost as he's become
single mindedly focused
on the epitome of the evil that he is fighting,
which takes us to the evil Sunday Sunday, this behemoth of a man, this
bold,
larger than life man who is witty is charming,
(10:44):
yet
undeniably is is evil.
And during the final chase,
the six police and so yes, it turns out everyone else on the cabal apart from Sunday, were, were
funnily enough, they were all recruited by Sunday themselves, which is a little bit of a a twist ending,
I guess. Although it's it's pretty obvious when you're reading it through, like, who who the man in the
(11:08):
in the who was recruited them all.
The man in the darkroom.
We we get to see like their thoughts on Sunday. Why why are they so
strongly against him? Why are they doing all of these things to capture him? And the funny thing is they almost unanimously,
I think they do.
(11:28):
They describe him as the universe. Sunday is the universe, and they have very flowery descriptions for this.
Some
describe it as looking into the sun. Like, you don't you don't really do that. It's it's fascinating, but it's also bad for you. You know that,
some describe him more in, like, a forest or a walk type thing. Some describe him as this faceless
(11:51):
man who has a face simultaneously.
Syme described him from the back as just this evil monstrosity. But when he saw him from the front was
a bubbling joy of good, of everything that is beautiful in the world, this sort of thing. And it's almost like, you
know, within the universe that they're describing of this evil of Sunday
(12:13):
is the the abyss. There is the beauty of the eternal, of the vastness of the universe and things like this. And then there's also niches abyss where, you know, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares into you of this kind of horror, of this dread of the I don't know if you call it the unknown, but of the vast of the grand
and
(12:34):
the I think to describe
what went wrong, this paradox of how Syme
is sort of became what he hated
was
as he came into
the plan, as he started to fight what it was that he hated
as he got into it, he already had this preconceived notion of the anarchists are evil. And so when he met someone,
(12:59):
the ringleader, the top person of the pure evil that he was meant to find,
he he instead found, sure, some some evil, but also
a section of beauty within it. And it almost seemed an equal measure.
You could probably say the same about some of those people I listed. Stalin, for
all the bad things he did,
did was apparently a very charming man and probably when you were in his presence
(13:24):
would be able to make you feel good. Would you would have good times with him? You would see the beautiful things that he was doing of how hard he was working to to, you know, help
the state to the USSR.
And so we we see we have, you know, people are contradictory. This is what happens. There is
finding pure evil is a very, very hard thing to do. And
(13:46):
once you have this judgment or momentum coming in,
it's almost like you have to fight against it, even though there is beauty and there is good within it. And,
you know, this isn't really a lesson of practicalities.
This book, it's it's more on the philosophical
sense of of
fighting against something and yet realizing that
(14:08):
perhaps you are becoming it as well, getting lost in your own judgment, not taking the time to evaluate your actions and see, am I actually becoming
what I what I hate? You know, he who fight as a quote, I'm not going to get it particularly right, but, you know,
ye who fights monsters,
watch out that you don't become one or something something like that
(14:30):
of of becoming what you're afraid of. So
that's that's kind of what I took from this book, which is this paradoxical
thing where, sure, Syme would describe himself as, like, a normal,
nice mannered man and that yet here we see him dueling and fighting people,
relatively quickly.
Doesn't bit contradictory.
(14:51):
Let's jump into the author, perhaps some extra details. So Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
English author, born in 1874.
He is somewhat like this book, was rather contradictory because he mostly wrote about serious stuff. He was, I believe, a journalist, art critic, things like this.
And
he particularly was a Christian apologist,
(15:14):
I believe. And that is that he was defending Christianity.
And he wrote some books.
Orthodoxy
is is probably his most well known one.
But a series father Brown, I think was kind of like a a detective or a Christian who solves crimes, something like this. Or, you know, think of like the Miss Marple or or, or characters like that where they're not really a detective, but they're, you know, they they kind of find their ways into into it.
(15:44):
And this book is such an anomaly because
from what I understand from his other works, I've yet to read any. I might in the future. This is just it's pure chaos and silliness.
I I don't think I've done a good job just yet. Hopefully, I'll be able to touch upon it at the end of just how silly this book is.
And people interpreted his this book through this lens of seriousness
(16:08):
and especially of this
character of Sunday as a deity and perhaps attaching religious
undertones to the characters and, you know, the seven of them. So seven days of the week, you know, those seven
sim
symbology, I guess, is very prevalent in in the Bible as well and things like this. You know, Sunday, is that the first day of the week? Oh my god. Did God create the universe then, or was it the last day? You know, who knows?
(16:34):
And yet he notes right at the end of this that
he he feels that people the critics were didn't get it right because that, the book itself, they they focused on the words, and they almost missed the title. They almost missed the they did miss the most obvious thing, which was the title, The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare. It's actually missing it from this book. It was reflective of the time,
(16:56):
so pessimistic,
doubtful
of the world, but with maybe some hope
that it's almost like pessimism could draw its own positivity, something like that.
Funnily enough, the most attracting part of my reading this beforehand was the title.
I thought it was a great title, The Man Who Was Thursday. What does that mean? You know,
(17:16):
that you discover very quickly of why it's titled like that because, you know, he he became named Thursday.
Brood, I think is a really great title. One probably one of the best just in terms of, like, a pure title for a book.
One of the best I've I've come across,
evocative,
interesting, and it gets resolved rather quickly. So you're also not
(17:38):
debating the whole book, like, trying to interpret it.
I was fortunate in that I it came from a rant of a really good friend who recommended this to me.
And
this didn't ruin the title for me.
And I had no idea of what the book was about.
So I got to experience the curiosity of the title without ever knowing. So sorry, I might have ruined that for you now. And
(18:03):
and funnily enough, as we actually see on this book, it doesn't even have the subtitle, The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare.
So g k Chesterton probably still rolling in his grave because it's not even on the the goddamn Penguin books version that I have here.
Yet he, even in his own time, was noting how people were getting the title wrong. So, oh, man, just beautifully, like, you can't ask for more paradox and
(18:26):
silliness than than that. So I'm going to add this note here because it'll rather contradict the summary I'm going to give.
My intention for this book
was for a pleasant read. You know, I I was just like, I didn't have any real expectations coming in, to be honest, other than
this friend of mine. I'll call him out, Dave Jones, who was saying, like, you have to read this book. Like, drop drop everything you got and read this immediately.
(18:50):
And,
I wasn't looking for deeper thought. As soon as I
found out it wasn't super serious and it was silly, I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna enjoy this.
And
that, you know, the amount of notes that I typically take for book review like this on my on my phone here,
I'll typically take maybe
six paragraphs, six to 10 paragraphs. You know, if I if I scroll down here, I can see that for some of these other books that I've got here, the Blue Ocean Strategy or the Lucky Country, I've got copious, copious notes. But for this one, I think I had one paragraph and one extra note about the title.
(19:26):
Yet as I was doing this book review, I'm like, oh, you know what? This is actually rather intriguing. Oh, I remember this portion from the end.
There was
some real
insightful moments, some powerful moments such as
the introduction. We see him meeting Gregory,
who is I guess the he's actually the most evil character that you'll find within the book, the real anarchist in some sort of sense.
(19:52):
And
they he right at the end of the book, we get to meet him again. And
he he
declaims or he moans.
He complains
against the the cabal who are now having like this fancy dress party. They've all kind of reconciled with Sunday and realized he's a beautiful man.
And he's like, you guys don't know suffering. You've yet to be broken.
(20:16):
And
Simon argues against this and says, you know, no, I have we have. But but looks at Sunday and I was like, Have you have you suffered Sunday? And Sunday answers,
Can you drink of the cup that I drink of? Which is
once again, it is a biblical reference, so I can see why people were talking about this.
I feel like you could dig deeper into this. I feel like there was a lot of sections that I haven't missed that my initial reading of this book, because it was superficial and funny,
(20:45):
it
I perhaps
glossed over a lot of what the deepness
would be. Hence why I actually
turned this into a deeper book review than I originally intended.
I originally was after reading. It was like, oh, yeah. I'll talk about the silliness and and it'll be fun, but, you know, I'll get this done within fifteen minutes.
Yet
I can see why my philosopher friend Dave Jones recommended this because
(21:10):
it has that same quality to it that I find in 1984
that I've found in numerous,
Dostoevsky
books, such as The Brothers Karamazov
or,
Crime and Punishment,
where particularly where it'll be like a monologue of the character.
So think of the,
the manifesto
(21:31):
that we find in Goldstein's,
manifesto
in 1984
or Raskolnikov
with the with the prostitute in crime punishment or even of the,
inquisition scene in the brothers Kramersov.
We get I find in those scenes, there's something, like, powerful. It draws me in. I don't know what it is. It's very it's like an essence.
(21:53):
It's very hard to describe.
I find that there's
deeper meaning in these sections when something captures me so powerfully.
Why I would never be an author myself because there's no way I can construct words on
paper or on my phone or on a I don't have this way of words that these people have of of drawing you in or at least myself in,
(22:18):
and that a bit of this is actually lost within this book or
you might need to reread it. And I do intend rereading this at some stage because it's so silly. It is so funny
that that you can kind of gloss over these these
portions which are
much stronger.
So let's jump into the summary. Similar books recommendations.
(22:39):
I don't think I've done a good job of
relaying how
funny this book is, of how silly, how humorous just the actual story is. The weirdness, the satire, the paradox,
the unexpected contradictions,
You know, obviously on the grand scale
of in terms of
the whole setup of these policemen who are all in disguise end up fighting against this man who employed them himself. Like the whole thing from start to finish is is pretty funny.
(23:10):
But even in the really small details, such like professor dewormes,
when he was talking about his imposter and and how he came into this position,
And he was
like, you know, explaining things which aren't
as self evident, which aren't necessarily.
So he was an actor and he's like, you know, I was trying to portray this feeble old man. And when I went into the same room as him, obviously,
(23:34):
people thought I was the real old man because I have the energy of youth in directing towards being feeble and old. So it's this real twist on on what you kind of expect.
In first reading, it's merely fun, but I I intend to go back in this and and still have fun whilst reading it, but tackle it with another light, another lens
(23:56):
of viewing for deeper things because that's not what I was
looking for or appreciating when I read it this first time.
So
I don't know what to give this because initially, if if you'd asked me what's the rating of this book
after reading it before doing the notes for this, I'd have been like, it's five and a half out of 10. It's fun. It's silly.
(24:18):
I got a couple laughs from it. Am I looking for anything deeper from this? Would I ever reread it? Probably not. Yet after creating these notes, I'm like, damn, this was this is pretty damn good. I do want to reread this. So I'm going to give this a simultaneous five and a half out of 10. And then it also eight out of 10. The man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton,
definitely has potential in it. And one of those rare books where I'd I'd probably recommend it to to really anyone because
(24:45):
you can have fun and silliness with it and get that or you can go deeper into it and dive into serious topics. So definitely definitely worth a read.
Similar books, man. I've already listed what nineteen ninety four Brothers Karamazov.
A couple of other things. This reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes, especially with the titles at the front and and how it's set out.
(25:08):
The long, drawn out nature and secrecy of the
of the
police detectors
reminds me of a spy novel such as John the cars, Tinker Tanger Soldier Spy.
It's hard to go away from the similarities of Franz Kafka or Alba Camus with the with the weirdness
of the
the strange
(25:28):
paradox,
but it's much more lighthearted than that.
And it's got these nice twists in it as well that you'll see in something more like Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. So, I mean,
it's a it's a banger of a book. I really, really do enjoy it. So, yeah. Check out The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton.
Value for value. That'll be the end of this book review.
(25:48):
What can you do to provide some value back for this? Well, this is a value for value podcast. So I do try and hope that I've given you a lot of value up front here.
So sharing this with someone, giving us a recommendation
of giving me recommendations of books you think I would enjoy that are similar to this.
I would love to know of a book that you think is
(26:09):
available for anyone where it has the the capture of just being a nice read, but also having deeper aspects. If you want to dive into that, please reach out via some mechanism. You can also support the podcast financially
via the PayPal link down below in the show notes.
Of last week,
Carlos AM,
(26:29):
actually left a really nice,
comment on the bookery or not book review, the it was kind of a book review, I guess, of of the alchemist, Uralkamista,
of the art of translation. And one thing he noted, which, I didn't touch upon, but which I I think is definitely worthy
of of
highlighting was
(26:50):
sometimes even within languages themselves, they need retranslations.
And if you've ever tried to read any of Adam Smith or,
people of that like,
damn, it's pretty hard to read old English, man. Like from the fifteen hundreds, '16 hundreds, '17 hundreds even,
there is
an English has changed a lot over that time. So not only
(27:13):
when you are translating from completely different languages, but the
same language, old English,
I. E. English nowadays,
it it can require
translations
of the same language. So time itself has a diluting effect on the actual translation
because the older the translation is, the more likely
(27:35):
whatever you're translating into has also changed over time. And hence why kids nowadays,
you know, and I say nowadays, but it's always nowadays for everyone
speak with words which just would make no sense to, you know, skibbidi and shit like that.
And
that that's just the way they talk. And much like someone will say rad or cool, and they might mean something different from what rad or cool means nowadays,
(28:02):
especially if they're older. So thank you very much, Carlos Seam, for that comment. Really, was really insightful. I thought thought that was great.
We are live here. I am live here on 11AM
on a Wednesday, Australian Eastern Standard Time. We'd love for you to come join in. We do see the mere mortals podcast, AKA one.
We're saying, yeah, my favorite time of the week is a Thursday.
(28:24):
Imagine if if the man had been Friday.
I'm not sure what would have happened if it'd been Friday. I don't think that the actual day of the week was
very important other than Sunday.
There was some symbology right at the end in terms of like the moons, how they were dressed up, things like this.
You know, if I was a Christian scholar, perhaps there would be a lot more
(28:47):
depth to this book because I do feel there's probably some Christian
symbology,
theology
written within here that,
I'm not aware of because I don't dove into Christianity. It's not that interesting to me.
But, yeah, maybe I'll I'll jump into one of his other books, Orthodoxy, and and give that a try, for example. So,
(29:07):
really do appreciate you joining in, everyone. And, yeah, we'd love love for you to to come join in. If you want notifications of that, I do post in the Discord as well as on our Twitter account.
So just joining any of those and you can also hit the bell notifications, those sort of things on YouTube. We are live on the podcasting apps as well.
(29:28):
What's coming up? One
has said he's got three book reviews this month, maybe. We'll see. But almost certainly, he will be doing the 48 laws of power. I've got Blue Ocean Strategy right down here below me. I've almost finished the lucky country. I'm working on the gilded age by Mark Twain.
And that is the foreseeable future for the mere mortals book reviews. So really appreciate you joining in. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Chat for now. Karen out. Bye.
To save the world, you must be first willing to burn it.
Welcome
everyone to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 02/05/2025.
(00:21):
Now as you might surmise, this is the podcast where I unleash my anarchic fury on the book establishment
elite.
Okay. No. I won't be doing that today. But I will be talking about this book here that we have, The Man Who Was Thursday by g k Chesterton.
So this book was published in nineteen o eight, a hundred and seventy eight pages in length. Took me probably two to three hours reading because it is a rather short novel. It's don't doesn't take too long to really get through, and it is fun, which means you will, actually probably get through it a bit quicker than you normally will. So this is a short fictional novel of a policeman who joins a seven person
(00:58):
high cabal ranking system of anarchists
anarchists
who are applauding to take down the world, basically.
And he wants to stop their evil ideology. So he enters in disguise as a as a policeman, but pretending to be an anarchist as well. I'm gonna be struggling with that word a lot, I imagine.
And he begins to learn that there are actually some allies,
(01:19):
amongst him in this this seven person cabal. And so he's enlisting their help to take down the ringleader, the big the big kahuna himself.
And it's set in 1900
nineteen hundreds England, has a bizarre
feel to it, absurdist style, but with a levity that I I don't think you'll find in some other works which is similar to this, and we'll get on to that at the at the very end.
(01:43):
15 chapters in total, and they all have rather unique names. So the two poets of Saffron Park, the secret of Gabriel Simon, the tale of a detective, the exposure, the man in spectacles, the jewel, the criminals chase the police, etcetera, etcetera. It goes on and on.
So let's jump into the themes and some questions for today.
And they're gonna be centered around paradox, which is a favorite of mine. I love talking about paradox. Find it fascinating,
(02:08):
but in particular, why it emerges
within people and in particular,
how people can become
what they say that they hate or that they're fighting against.
What what is it that people actually fear and why do they fear it? Paradoxically,
sometimes fear can cause itself or that good things can cause fear.
And how do we even know what we're we're fearful of? So we start the book with with Syme. This is the the detective, and it's a banger of a start. I really, really enjoyed the start of this book. The first probably like 20 pages just drew me in instantly.
(02:42):
And what we see with him is,
it's you get this huge payoff of of this tension of the setting up of the tension of of what's gonna happen with this book because
very quickly, we see this
sneaky underhanded thing where he infiltrates the the anarchists. He gets elected
very sneakily as well using
(03:03):
great oratory manners
to get elected to the council.
And he then joins the council, and and we're set up with this this big enemy,
the the main, ringlander,
who is named Sunday.
And
all the people in this cabal, the seven people,
they're all named after a day of the week, hence why he is the man who was Thursday. So we see his motivations, his upbringing
(03:28):
as a child
of what led him to fight against anarchy so, so strongly,
why
he joined the police, how he joined the police in a rather fortunate manner.
And it really sets up the book nicely in terms of the motivation of this character.
And I think it it starts off it while still silly at the start, it's
(03:51):
it has this chance to become a a more serious novel at a certain point, probably within the like the first twenty pages where it's like, okay, this this could actually be like, you know, there's a gripping tension when the first,
policemen
on the other policemen on the
cabal meeting gets exposed, it could have been him. And you're like, geez, this could turn into like a serious, dangerous situation or things like this. So on the serious side of things,
(04:17):
I think there is a deep truth to this idea of the intellectual criminal
why Syme was fighting so hard against anarchy.
And it's it's because,
you know, suffering is is rather hard to quantify.
And when you have things like white collar crime, which is
causing, you know, fraud,
financial suffering
(04:38):
of underhanded dealings
of where it's very hard to improve and approve intent
of
where there's no
real physical evidence of the crime. It's it's somewhat of a he said, she said sort of thing.
There's a lot of suffering there, but it's hard to quantify and put a responsibility to when companies
(05:00):
explode or implode or there is,
you know, underhanded dealings of stock markets and things like this,
versus the real simple stuff of, you know, criminals who murder someone in a crime of passion, of thief, thievery, of stealing physical objects and things like this.
And we certainly see that some of the recent villains, some of the most evil people in history
(05:24):
have been those ones who you would almost call white collar criminals in a sense. And I'm talking of the the Lenon's, the Stalin's, the Pol Pot's,
these these people who
whilst they you could say
they they thought they were doing good, they're actually doing a lot of bad.
And there was not anarchy. You know, those those that I listed were communist, but
(05:47):
there was this,
they believe themselves beyond morals in some sort of ways. They they ended up becoming what they they said they hated, which was, you know, the powerful elite who don't care about people and who, you know, suppressing the plebs and things like this. And they ended up becoming what what they hated.
It's funny in many ways I would I would trust the fate of Australia to a bitter murderer
(06:13):
rather than a bitter anarchist, for example,
because what we start to see with these people is that they they become what they hate. And
I guess going back to the book onto the more silly side of things,
the book doesn't go down this route of of really explaining
anarchy, why Simon is so against it, why he thinks this ideology is,
(06:35):
is going to ruin the world, essentially, why it why it's more evil than perhaps someone who murders people, for example.
No. It it goes down the silly side. So we see him dive into this nest of rats, this den of vipers, if you will.
And
as he
progresses through, the plot thickens and we realize, okay, a lot of these anarchists are actually policemen
(06:58):
in disguise, much like he is to infiltrate infiltrate this cabal.
And
as he
recruits more allies to the cause, as he is,
you know, trying to stop their plots of of bombings and things like this, of of murdering
influential
people,
he realizes, well, he doesn't realize we see that he's actually causing a lot of chaos himself. So we see there's this random chase with the professor one of the other
(07:27):
days of the week who we learn is actually a policeman.
The second policeman we learn of,
where they're just like straight up running through the streets and and
going crazy.
We see the jewel outside of a a train station where he essentially confronts a man
and, you know, sets up this jewel. We see a crazy motor
(07:49):
foot chase turned to motor chase
with a large crowd of, you know, driving through streets of requisitioning vehicles, of
enlisting help, of getting down to the beach to fight to the death and fight for their cause,
which turns out to be a big misunderstanding.
And finally, the wackiest craziest stuff is the the final chase of Sunday,
(08:12):
where
there's
a an attempt to apprehend Sunday,
and it turns into massive once again chase through the streets,
chaos,
elephants get involved, hot air balloons get involved.
It becomes madness. And so even though he is against anarchy and he is for order and rules and things like this, we see in his actions and the actions of these other policemen
(08:37):
that, you know what, they're actually causing a lot of anarchy. Like, there's a lot of chaos going on here.
I would describe Syme as a relatively
introspective sort of person.
He has a very clear reason
reason for his actions, why
and philosophy of why he's fighting against anarchy.
And
he also spent the time into, I guess,
(08:58):
deciphering
why he is against these and looking at himself.
The other police, not so much. Some of them were just an actor who fell into the role of of fighting against this,
of this person of of anarchy.
So some of the others that their reasonings for getting into the business was a little bit iffy and seems just precarious. So just just a whim at the moment. So we'll put them to the side and really focus on time here
(09:25):
in terms of this aspect of becoming what he what he hates in some sort of sense. And,
you know, why does he engage in behavior that is contradict contradictory
to a stated aims
of preserving peace of,
you know, keeping the streets safe for people of
not
allowing people to just follow their whims and to
(09:49):
create disorder and things like this.
It's not for the greater good, which is typically what you'll see in cases like this where
this is where I imagine
the Stalin's of the world, they would say, like, yeah, we need to break some eggs to make an omelette sort of deal. Sure. We need to some press
the the cool locks, for example. But
this is for the greater good to make the, you know, yes, we have to kill some people. Well, sure, starve a couple of million people, but, you know, it's all for the greater good sort of thing. There's none of that rationalization
(10:21):
going on here because the thought doesn't cross his mind. It's almost as he's become
single mindedly focused
on the epitome of the evil that he is fighting,
which takes us to the evil Sunday Sunday, this behemoth of a man, this
bold,
larger than life man who is witty is charming,
(10:44):
yet
undeniably is is evil.
And during the final chase,
the six police and so yes, it turns out everyone else on the cabal apart from Sunday, were, were
funnily enough, they were all recruited by Sunday themselves, which is a little bit of a a twist ending,
I guess. Although it's it's pretty obvious when you're reading it through, like, who who the man in the
(11:08):
in the who was recruited them all.
The man in the darkroom.
We we get to see like their thoughts on Sunday. Why why are they so
strongly against him? Why are they doing all of these things to capture him? And the funny thing is they almost unanimously,
I think they do.
(11:28):
They describe him as the universe. Sunday is the universe, and they have very flowery descriptions for this.
Some
describe it as looking into the sun. Like, you don't you don't really do that. It's it's fascinating, but it's also bad for you. You know that,
some describe him more in, like, a forest or a walk type thing. Some describe him as this faceless
(11:51):
man who has a face simultaneously.
Syme described him from the back as just this evil monstrosity. But when he saw him from the front was
a bubbling joy of good, of everything that is beautiful in the world, this sort of thing. And it's almost like, you
know, within the universe that they're describing of this evil of Sunday
(12:13):
is the the abyss. There is the beauty of the eternal, of the vastness of the universe and things like this. And then there's also niches abyss where, you know, you stare into the abyss and the abyss stares into you of this kind of horror, of this dread of the I don't know if you call it the unknown, but of the vast of the grand
and
(12:34):
the I think to describe
what went wrong, this paradox of how Syme
is sort of became what he hated
was
as he came into
the plan, as he started to fight what it was that he hated
as he got into it, he already had this preconceived notion of the anarchists are evil. And so when he met someone,
(12:59):
the ringleader, the top person of the pure evil that he was meant to find,
he he instead found, sure, some some evil, but also
a section of beauty within it. And it almost seemed an equal measure.
You could probably say the same about some of those people I listed. Stalin, for
all the bad things he did,
did was apparently a very charming man and probably when you were in his presence
(13:24):
would be able to make you feel good. Would you would have good times with him? You would see the beautiful things that he was doing of how hard he was working to to, you know, help
the state to the USSR.
And so we we see we have, you know, people are contradictory. This is what happens. There is
finding pure evil is a very, very hard thing to do. And
(13:46):
once you have this judgment or momentum coming in,
it's almost like you have to fight against it, even though there is beauty and there is good within it. And,
you know, this isn't really a lesson of practicalities.
This book, it's it's more on the philosophical
sense of of
fighting against something and yet realizing that
(14:08):
perhaps you are becoming it as well, getting lost in your own judgment, not taking the time to evaluate your actions and see, am I actually becoming
what I what I hate? You know, he who fight as a quote, I'm not going to get it particularly right, but, you know,
ye who fights monsters,
watch out that you don't become one or something something like that
(14:30):
of of becoming what you're afraid of. So
that's that's kind of what I took from this book, which is this paradoxical
thing where, sure, Syme would describe himself as, like, a normal,
nice mannered man and that yet here we see him dueling and fighting people,
relatively quickly.
Doesn't bit contradictory.
(14:51):
Let's jump into the author, perhaps some extra details. So Gilbert Keith Chesterton,
English author, born in 1874.
He is somewhat like this book, was rather contradictory because he mostly wrote about serious stuff. He was, I believe, a journalist, art critic, things like this.
And
he particularly was a Christian apologist,
(15:14):
I believe. And that is that he was defending Christianity.
And he wrote some books.
Orthodoxy
is is probably his most well known one.
But a series father Brown, I think was kind of like a a detective or a Christian who solves crimes, something like this. Or, you know, think of like the Miss Marple or or, or characters like that where they're not really a detective, but they're, you know, they they kind of find their ways into into it.
(15:44):
And this book is such an anomaly because
from what I understand from his other works, I've yet to read any. I might in the future. This is just it's pure chaos and silliness.
I I don't think I've done a good job just yet. Hopefully, I'll be able to touch upon it at the end of just how silly this book is.
And people interpreted his this book through this lens of seriousness
(16:08):
and especially of this
character of Sunday as a deity and perhaps attaching religious
undertones to the characters and, you know, the seven of them. So seven days of the week, you know, those seven
sim
symbology, I guess, is very prevalent in in the Bible as well and things like this. You know, Sunday, is that the first day of the week? Oh my god. Did God create the universe then, or was it the last day? You know, who knows?
(16:34):
And yet he notes right at the end of this that
he he feels that people the critics were didn't get it right because that, the book itself, they they focused on the words, and they almost missed the title. They almost missed the they did miss the most obvious thing, which was the title, The Man Who Was Thursday, a nightmare. It's actually missing it from this book. It was reflective of the time,
(16:56):
so pessimistic,
doubtful
of the world, but with maybe some hope
that it's almost like pessimism could draw its own positivity, something like that.
Funnily enough, the most attracting part of my reading this beforehand was the title.
I thought it was a great title, The Man Who Was Thursday. What does that mean? You know,
(17:16):
that you discover very quickly of why it's titled like that because, you know, he he became named Thursday.
Brood, I think is a really great title. One probably one of the best just in terms of, like, a pure title for a book.
One of the best I've I've come across,
evocative,
interesting, and it gets resolved rather quickly. So you're also not
(17:38):
debating the whole book, like, trying to interpret it.
I was fortunate in that I it came from a rant of a really good friend who recommended this to me.
And
this didn't ruin the title for me.
And I had no idea of what the book was about.
So I got to experience the curiosity of the title without ever knowing. So sorry, I might have ruined that for you now. And
(18:03):
and funnily enough, as we actually see on this book, it doesn't even have the subtitle, The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare.
So g k Chesterton probably still rolling in his grave because it's not even on the the goddamn Penguin books version that I have here.
Yet he, even in his own time, was noting how people were getting the title wrong. So, oh, man, just beautifully, like, you can't ask for more paradox and
(18:26):
silliness than than that. So I'm going to add this note here because it'll rather contradict the summary I'm going to give.
My intention for this book
was for a pleasant read. You know, I I was just like, I didn't have any real expectations coming in, to be honest, other than
this friend of mine. I'll call him out, Dave Jones, who was saying, like, you have to read this book. Like, drop drop everything you got and read this immediately.
(18:50):
And,
I wasn't looking for deeper thought. As soon as I
found out it wasn't super serious and it was silly, I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna enjoy this.
And
that, you know, the amount of notes that I typically take for book review like this on my on my phone here,
I'll typically take maybe
six paragraphs, six to 10 paragraphs. You know, if I if I scroll down here, I can see that for some of these other books that I've got here, the Blue Ocean Strategy or the Lucky Country, I've got copious, copious notes. But for this one, I think I had one paragraph and one extra note about the title.
(19:26):
Yet as I was doing this book review, I'm like, oh, you know what? This is actually rather intriguing. Oh, I remember this portion from the end.
There was
some real
insightful moments, some powerful moments such as
the introduction. We see him meeting Gregory,
who is I guess the he's actually the most evil character that you'll find within the book, the real anarchist in some sort of sense.
(19:52):
And
they he right at the end of the book, we get to meet him again. And
he he
declaims or he moans.
He complains
against the the cabal who are now having like this fancy dress party. They've all kind of reconciled with Sunday and realized he's a beautiful man.
And he's like, you guys don't know suffering. You've yet to be broken.
(20:16):
And
Simon argues against this and says, you know, no, I have we have. But but looks at Sunday and I was like, Have you have you suffered Sunday? And Sunday answers,
Can you drink of the cup that I drink of? Which is
once again, it is a biblical reference, so I can see why people were talking about this.
I feel like you could dig deeper into this. I feel like there was a lot of sections that I haven't missed that my initial reading of this book, because it was superficial and funny,
(20:45):
it
I perhaps
glossed over a lot of what the deepness
would be. Hence why I actually
turned this into a deeper book review than I originally intended.
I originally was after reading. It was like, oh, yeah. I'll talk about the silliness and and it'll be fun, but, you know, I'll get this done within fifteen minutes.
Yet
I can see why my philosopher friend Dave Jones recommended this because
(21:10):
it has that same quality to it that I find in 1984
that I've found in numerous,
Dostoevsky
books, such as The Brothers Karamazov
or,
Crime and Punishment,
where particularly where it'll be like a monologue of the character.
So think of the,
the manifesto
(21:31):
that we find in Goldstein's,
manifesto
in 1984
or Raskolnikov
with the with the prostitute in crime punishment or even of the,
inquisition scene in the brothers Kramersov.
We get I find in those scenes, there's something, like, powerful. It draws me in. I don't know what it is. It's very it's like an essence.
(21:53):
It's very hard to describe.
I find that there's
deeper meaning in these sections when something captures me so powerfully.
Why I would never be an author myself because there's no way I can construct words on
paper or on my phone or on a I don't have this way of words that these people have of of drawing you in or at least myself in,
(22:18):
and that a bit of this is actually lost within this book or
you might need to reread it. And I do intend rereading this at some stage because it's so silly. It is so funny
that that you can kind of gloss over these these
portions which are
much stronger.
So let's jump into the summary. Similar books recommendations.
(22:39):
I don't think I've done a good job of
relaying how
funny this book is, of how silly, how humorous just the actual story is. The weirdness, the satire, the paradox,
the unexpected contradictions,
You know, obviously on the grand scale
of in terms of
the whole setup of these policemen who are all in disguise end up fighting against this man who employed them himself. Like the whole thing from start to finish is is pretty funny.
(23:10):
But even in the really small details, such like professor dewormes,
when he was talking about his imposter and and how he came into this position,
And he was
like, you know, explaining things which aren't
as self evident, which aren't necessarily.
So he was an actor and he's like, you know, I was trying to portray this feeble old man. And when I went into the same room as him, obviously,
(23:34):
people thought I was the real old man because I have the energy of youth in directing towards being feeble and old. So it's this real twist on on what you kind of expect.
In first reading, it's merely fun, but I I intend to go back in this and and still have fun whilst reading it, but tackle it with another light, another lens
(23:56):
of viewing for deeper things because that's not what I was
looking for or appreciating when I read it this first time.
So
I don't know what to give this because initially, if if you'd asked me what's the rating of this book
after reading it before doing the notes for this, I'd have been like, it's five and a half out of 10. It's fun. It's silly.
(24:18):
I got a couple laughs from it. Am I looking for anything deeper from this? Would I ever reread it? Probably not. Yet after creating these notes, I'm like, damn, this was this is pretty damn good. I do want to reread this. So I'm going to give this a simultaneous five and a half out of 10. And then it also eight out of 10. The man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton,
definitely has potential in it. And one of those rare books where I'd I'd probably recommend it to to really anyone because
(24:45):
you can have fun and silliness with it and get that or you can go deeper into it and dive into serious topics. So definitely definitely worth a read.
Similar books, man. I've already listed what nineteen ninety four Brothers Karamazov.
A couple of other things. This reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes, especially with the titles at the front and and how it's set out.
(25:08):
The long, drawn out nature and secrecy of the
of the
police detectors
reminds me of a spy novel such as John the cars, Tinker Tanger Soldier Spy.
It's hard to go away from the similarities of Franz Kafka or Alba Camus with the with the weirdness
of the
the strange
(25:28):
paradox,
but it's much more lighthearted than that.
And it's got these nice twists in it as well that you'll see in something more like Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. So, I mean,
it's a it's a banger of a book. I really, really do enjoy it. So, yeah. Check out The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton.
Value for value. That'll be the end of this book review.
(25:48):
What can you do to provide some value back for this? Well, this is a value for value podcast. So I do try and hope that I've given you a lot of value up front here.
So sharing this with someone, giving us a recommendation
of giving me recommendations of books you think I would enjoy that are similar to this.
I would love to know of a book that you think is
(26:09):
available for anyone where it has the the capture of just being a nice read, but also having deeper aspects. If you want to dive into that, please reach out via some mechanism. You can also support the podcast financially
via the PayPal link down below in the show notes.
Of last week,
Carlos AM,
(26:29):
actually left a really nice,
comment on the bookery or not book review, the it was kind of a book review, I guess, of of the alchemist, Uralkamista,
of the art of translation. And one thing he noted, which, I didn't touch upon, but which I I think is definitely worthy
of of
highlighting was
(26:50):
sometimes even within languages themselves, they need retranslations.
And if you've ever tried to read any of Adam Smith or,
people of that like,
damn, it's pretty hard to read old English, man. Like from the fifteen hundreds, '16 hundreds, '17 hundreds even,
there is
an English has changed a lot over that time. So not only
(27:13):
when you are translating from completely different languages, but the
same language, old English,
I. E. English nowadays,
it it can require
translations
of the same language. So time itself has a diluting effect on the actual translation
because the older the translation is, the more likely
(27:35):
whatever you're translating into has also changed over time. And hence why kids nowadays,
you know, and I say nowadays, but it's always nowadays for everyone
speak with words which just would make no sense to, you know, skibbidi and shit like that.
And
that that's just the way they talk. And much like someone will say rad or cool, and they might mean something different from what rad or cool means nowadays,
(28:02):
especially if they're older. So thank you very much, Carlos Seam, for that comment. Really, was really insightful. I thought thought that was great.
We are live here. I am live here on 11AM
on a Wednesday, Australian Eastern Standard Time. We'd love for you to come join in. We do see the mere mortals podcast, AKA one.
We're saying, yeah, my favorite time of the week is a Thursday.
(28:24):
Imagine if if the man had been Friday.
I'm not sure what would have happened if it'd been Friday. I don't think that the actual day of the week was
very important other than Sunday.
There was some symbology right at the end in terms of like the moons, how they were dressed up, things like this.
You know, if I was a Christian scholar, perhaps there would be a lot more
(28:47):
depth to this book because I do feel there's probably some Christian
symbology,
theology
written within here that,
I'm not aware of because I don't dove into Christianity. It's not that interesting to me.
But, yeah, maybe I'll I'll jump into one of his other books, Orthodoxy, and and give that a try, for example. So,
(29:07):
really do appreciate you joining in, everyone. And, yeah, we'd love love for you to to come join in. If you want notifications of that, I do post in the Discord as well as on our Twitter account.
So just joining any of those and you can also hit the bell notifications, those sort of things on YouTube. We are live on the podcasting apps as well.
(29:28):
What's coming up? One
has said he's got three book reviews this month, maybe. We'll see. But almost certainly, he will be doing the 48 laws of power. I've got Blue Ocean Strategy right down here below me. I've almost finished the lucky country. I'm working on the gilded age by Mark Twain.
And that is the foreseeable future for the mere mortals book reviews. So really appreciate you joining in. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Chat for now. Karen out. Bye.
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