Is it Thursday already? *ahem* Chapters 4-6

So, nearly a week late, but a few thoughts on 4-6. I read them quickly after my last post and felt that they were flat – not nearly as exciting as the first chapters. We get some background on Syme and his philosophy, how he became a spy and then a whole lot of the anarchist council sitting around the table eating breakfast.

But my second reading of the same material unearthed some interesting nuggets. First (and I don't know if this is because I'm a genius at close reading or because it's blatantly obvious or because Adam Gopnik mentioned it in his review), I'm convinced that Sunday himself is a spy. Syme never sees the man who hires him into the police (or, rather, who condemns him to die as a martyr to the cause of law and order), but Syme can tell that he (the police boss) is "a man of massive stature". Sunday himself, when introduced later, becomes an object of fixation for Syme (and Chesterton), as he's constantly described as being nearly too big to be human. Ergo, the two men are the same, and Sunday is not just the head of the anarchists, he's the head of the secret police.

The second bit that caught my eye:

It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand.

This line gave me chills – a perfect summary of extremism. Rather than try to understand each other, the two sides are ready to martyr themselves . (The quote above is about Syme, but could just as easily have described the mindset of the anarchists). Today, Bush would rather start a war then try to find common ground with a perceived enemy, while religious extremists will kill "infidels" without trying to understand their (our, really) way of life. What hope is there if two sides won't take time to acknowledge our shared humanity?

Syme ends chapter six with his hand on his revolver, afraid that he's about to be exposed as a spy. But Gogol (known as Tuesday) gets fingered instead, and now we hurtle on...