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It’s made clear when reading The Man Who Was Thursday, that G.K. Chesterton is a poet first. His alliterative prose proudly dances across the page guiding the reader’s eyes as his wording helps elicit emotion. Those words form sentences, those sentences paragraphs, and before you know it, you have a novel, but the thing about this novel is the message behind all those words. It is what makes this novel compelling, and keeps it on readers TBR lists to this day, but is it really that good?

The story is hard to nail down. At its basic premise: a poet-police officer must infiltrate a group of anarchists who are attempting to destroy the world through nihilism, but he soon finds out he’s not alone in his mission and that the man behind the chaos may be the one who hired him in the first place.

I would describe the novel as a philosophical thriller, for the most part. An absurdist piece of fiction, Chesterton speaks at length about good versus evil, the nature of man, order versus chaos, and so on. He does this with a good bit of satirical comedy that helps to balance out some of the more fervent ramblings that take place in this novel—some talking points are written with passion. Some hit on topics still relevant today. It’s all awash in surreal trappings that quickly take a turn into the metaphysical in the third act. It’s a madcap bit of writing, and it’s a lot to handle.

Somewhere in there is where The Man Who Was Thursday can lose a lot of readers. That’s where it lost me. Although the story hit on a lot of great points and was generally well written, the world felt too addled and too zany to have any real impact. I was trying to make sense of it all, and then it gets wiped away in the end. Yes, it’s all about the journey, but the journey means nothing without an ending.

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