“A paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth,” says the poet and policeman Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel “The Man Who Was Thursday.” As it turns out, that’s a pretty good description of what Chesterton himself was up to when he wrote the book. Chesterton has been rightly called the “prince of paradox,” and indeed, paradoxes that point to forgotten truths run through much of his work.
The surrealist novel “The Man Who Was Thursday” is no exception. It’s a rollicking adventure in which appearances constantly deceive and the ground is always shifting beneath the characters’ (and reader’s) feet. Writing for “TIME Magazine’s Summer Reading List,” Kate Christensen described the novel as “a whacky, nightmarish, deliriously well-written adventure story for grownups in which nothing is what it seems and everyone wears a mask, whether figurative or literal.”
