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quote:Originally posted by expressionless:
Essentially, the Man Who Was Thursday is a meditation on the nature of God, part of G K Chesterton’s voicing/coming to terms with his doubts...
Yeees... I believe it's more a safe rendering of doubts he had prior to the turn of the twentieth century, at college, before he came to the realisation of his faith. The aestheticism of the time (drawn in beautiful detail in Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, IMSearinglyMyopicO) filled our Gilbert with horror : hence the depiction of the anarchists in TMWWT, and particularly Lucian Gregory, the flame-haired poet-anarchist. Gregory was actually based on a young man he knew at university, his association with whom is described vividly in Chesterton's essay 'The Diabolist', possibly my favourite of his hundreds of gorgeous essays.
TMWWT is subtitled 'A Nightmare'. Continual awareness of this is essential to the reading of the novel, otherwise even simple things like the radical warp and weft of time and space in the book appear to be huge gaps in continuity.
The book can be enjoyed on a variety of levels, but (true of most of Chesterton's writing) a love of paradox informs every idea within its pages. This means that there ends up being no definitive reading - and the fact that the inspiration for the writing is so acutely personal to a man now dead for sixty-five years, and yet TMWWT feels so universal is another basic fundamental within Chesterton's writing. He had a beautiful knack of being able to express complex and occasionally abstract concepts based within spirituality, personal experience, philosophy, politics and theology in funny, touching and finely observed single sentences written, not to impress or in order to fellate the ego of the writer, as is common with many others attempting the same trick, but to convey the emotion and context behind an idea as well as its intellectual bones.
TMWWT, at its heart, exemplifies one of Chesterton's fundamentally held beliefs, which (being the writer he was) wasn't necessarily always expressed in his writing, but was actually written into the 'genetic code' of everything he created. It's best summed up using a line belonging to Lenny C:
"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
(Edited as I decided not to add spoilers... and apologies if the above is sketchy/incoherent. So am I right now)
[ 20-10-2001: Message edited by: Jack The Bodiless ] |
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