Wednesday, 30 March 2011 06:21 pm
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deckardcanineNice to finish reading a novel in only two weeks for a change! This one was G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. My previous readings of Chesterton were the theosophical lectures of Heretics and Orthodoxy and the biography Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, all good (especially Orthodoxy) but far from novels.
My first exposure to TMWWT was an early passage excerpted in the brilliant PC game Deus Ex. Appropriately for the game as well as the book, it pertained to an extreme anarchist's manifesto. (Given this and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, were bomb-throwing anarchists a major concern a century ago?) I didn't know the source was real until I saw it listed among Chesterton's works. When I learned that the webcomic "Little Tales" alternated between original stories and a retelling of TMWWT, I resolved to read the latter someday.
It figures that my high expectations weren't quite fulfilled. For one thing, Chesterton is suspected to have had Asperger's, and it kinda shows in his wordiness and lack of separate "voices" for characters. There's only one noted female, and her fleeting role is either trivial or obscurely symbolic. More importantly, it feels a bit like three stories of different moods strewn together. I definitely like the first of these the best; it manages to be the most plainly intelligent, most credible, and funniest. The second part is sometimes exciting, but it's not a good sign when a book for grown-ups has the reader catching on faster than so-called detectives with just as much information. The third part answers preexisting questions in a whimsical yet preachy manner (if Tolkien hated Narnia, he'd surely hate this) but raises more, assuming you even care at that point of surreality. In a follow-up letter, Chesterton complains that too many people ignored the subtitle in their interpretation; even so, I'm not sure of everything he meant.
Still, I'm glad I read it. It taught me a few words, gave me some new philosophical takes on things, reminded me how some things were in Europe in 1908, brought me close to laughter on occasion, and readied me for "Little Tales." I plan to pick up another Chesterton novel someday, probably a Father Brown mystery.
In the meantime, I want to try something else for a while: Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Hey, I liked "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
My first exposure to TMWWT was an early passage excerpted in the brilliant PC game Deus Ex. Appropriately for the game as well as the book, it pertained to an extreme anarchist's manifesto. (Given this and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, were bomb-throwing anarchists a major concern a century ago?) I didn't know the source was real until I saw it listed among Chesterton's works. When I learned that the webcomic "Little Tales" alternated between original stories and a retelling of TMWWT, I resolved to read the latter someday.
It figures that my high expectations weren't quite fulfilled. For one thing, Chesterton is suspected to have had Asperger's, and it kinda shows in his wordiness and lack of separate "voices" for characters. There's only one noted female, and her fleeting role is either trivial or obscurely symbolic. More importantly, it feels a bit like three stories of different moods strewn together. I definitely like the first of these the best; it manages to be the most plainly intelligent, most credible, and funniest. The second part is sometimes exciting, but it's not a good sign when a book for grown-ups has the reader catching on faster than so-called detectives with just as much information. The third part answers preexisting questions in a whimsical yet preachy manner (if Tolkien hated Narnia, he'd surely hate this) but raises more, assuming you even care at that point of surreality. In a follow-up letter, Chesterton complains that too many people ignored the subtitle in their interpretation; even so, I'm not sure of everything he meant.
Still, I'm glad I read it. It taught me a few words, gave me some new philosophical takes on things, reminded me how some things were in Europe in 1908, brought me close to laughter on occasion, and readied me for "Little Tales." I plan to pick up another Chesterton novel someday, probably a Father Brown mystery.
In the meantime, I want to try something else for a while: Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Hey, I liked "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."