Chapters 7-9: What the Dickens?

Over at my other blog, an old friend described his own experience with The Man Who Was Thursday by writing, "I don’t recall all the details but that it was a good read. I just remember the way the plot spiraled out of control steadily." I think that about sums up chapters 7, 8, and 9, in which very little happens - seemingly happens? Throw me a rope here, G.K.!

The first of these three chapters is mostly spent on a parodic chase. After Sunday handles the capture of the spy, he adjourns the meeting (while throwing off some great lines: "If you’d take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it might." [p. 70]), and Syme flees only to find himself effortlessly pursued by one of the other anarchists. Reflecting on the chase, I thought alternately of the rather scary scenes in Terminator 2 in which the evil morphing robot relentlessly pursues the good guys and of the over-the-top chase sequences in the various Jason Bourne movies. Chesterton pulls it off quite well, I think.

In the next chapter, the pursuer, having caught Syme, reveals his true identity, which matches up quite well with Syme's own personal history and includes a rather funny bit about how a counterfeit can be more authentic than the real thing. Besides being a nifty little plot device, is this perhaps a comment by Chesterton on how fiction can be more real than journalism or history? Or is it a hint of another layer of duplicity and false identity behind the council of anarchists, which is at least three-sevenths cops? A shot in the dark: the police chief who is recruiting the policemen is actually an anarchist, recruiting men to be anarchists who pretend to be policemen.

This fuzziness made my head hurt, but I plunged on into the last of these three chapters, #9, which features even more wildness (a finger-tapping code, another policeman-anarchist), a few more of Chesterton's increasingly funny lines (for instance, at the top of p. 103), and a cabal of cops conspiring against one of the anarchists. It ends in a cliffhanger, but I can't help thinking that the object of the conspiracy is, of course, another cop pretending to be an anarchist.