It's Almost Thursday Again *ahem*

Almost two weeks late, and much more than a pound sterling short, I want nonetheless to offer my take on chapter four through six - not yet having read your own take on the chapters.

I wish I wasn't still dwelling sophomorically on the level of impressions and "takes" on the writing so far, but as I read these chapters, I found myself getting more comfortable with Chesterton's style, which marries a matter-of-fact one-thing-after-another narration to events that are implausible in the real world - but actually kinda likely in the book's world. I nearly rolled my eyes at the start of the big scene in chapter 4 which explains how Syme became a policeman. By the end, though, I was actually kind of impressed at this recruitment-by-accident scenario - and more interested in Syme as a character. If nothing else, he reminded me of the Americans who enlisted in the military after 9/11: having witnessed a terrorist attack (p. 40), he tries to fight back.

Then again, Chesterton is playing his cards pretty openly here, trying to argue - with the constable's talk about inner and outer rings of anarchist philosophers - that thinking is more dangerous to order than action. The anti-intellectualism here is sharp and cruel.

But as quickly as it flares, this anti-intellectualism vanishes. Or more properly, maybe, given the settings of so many scenes in the book, including one critical scene coming up, it goes underground, and we stay on the ground, and then go above the ground, on the balcony where the anarchist council is dining, right out in the open. (I wish I could find all the spots in the book where Chesterton uses this trope of hiding in plain sight; there have been at least a couple others already.) If I were reading the luncheon chapter by itself, I'd sneer at the fantasticalness of it, but since I'm not, I instead have to admire how it advances the plot. Sunday comes off as a monster, of course, and all the more so by the end of chapter 6, when he finally does something besides watching Syme/Thursday and eating. I'm eager to read chapters 7 through 9 to see how Sunday's denunciation plays out. I can't imagine it will be as simple as murder; that seems to be unlike Chesterton. But I'll see.

In the meantime, I have to risk a spoiler - or maybe just a wild-ass-guess. I hope I'm wrong in making this guess, because being right would really damage my view of Chesterton, but when I hit the paragraph in which Syme sees Sunday up on the balcony (p. 53), I immediately thought of the scene just a few pages earlier (p. 46) in which Syme meets the "chief" of the police: "Syme knew two things: first, that it [the voice of the chief] came from a man of massive stature; and second, that the man had his back to him." When Syme, being conducted to the anarchists' luncheon by his unnamed guide, sees Sunday, what does he see? "At the nearest end of the balcony... was the back of a great mountain of the man." G.K., say it ain't so! They can't be the SAME MAN, can they? Again, I'll see.