Matt: Initial thoughts, chapters 1-3

I'm hooked. These first three chapters read like a script treatment for a comic-book movie adaptation: two Victorian dandies (or fantastics, in Chesterton's terminology) take turns debating, surprising, and betraying each other — all the while living up to the value of their word as gentlemen.

The first few pages dragged for me, but once the two poets started their debate, things get interesting (if a bit pedantic; the characters are more talking-points of view than real people). Without recapping their anarchy vs. order debate in too much detail, allow me to repeat the "money quotes" that best capture their POVs.

Gregory, anarchist poet: "The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything."

Syme, law and order man: "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it."

When Syme finds Gregory waiting outside the garden for him, I worried that we were just in for more debating. Good heavens! Syme has "irritated" Gregory — things must be serious now!

But Chapter 2 brings us some action. After some lobster and a cigar (the lighting of which, by Syme, manages to further infuriate Gregory), the story takes a surreal and Pynchonian turn (pun intended) as their table screws into the ground and deposits them in a series of tunnels that harbor Gregory's anarchist arsenal. (This last is my shout out to Chesterton's love of alliteration. The man's unstoppable, and once I noticed his favorite poetic device, I found it littering nearly every page: "red and ragged," "angel and the ape," "reigned without rival," "clouds and creul colors," "broken past batteries of besiegers," and on and on.)

At the end of Chapter 3, Syme declares, "Perhaps what we are both doing what we think right. But what we think is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession." But in fact, it's only the fact that both Syme and Gregory are bound to a code of gentlemanly conduct that makes their etanglement, and this story, possible at all. Syme says, earlier, when invited to accopmany Gregory on his "very entertaining evening" that "I hope at least that [the poet] is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report anything of this..."

I'm struck by the quaint archaism of their kept promises; it's hard to imagine a present-day extremist keeping their word to a police/military officer when given the chance to overwhelm him in a well-hidden location. (And vice versa, try to imagine a federal agent not reaching for his gun — or his waterboard — when surrounded by "terrists" in their underground bunker.) While they both avow to have nothing in common and diametrically opposed goals, they understand each other so well that Syme can impersonate one of Sunday's minions and get himself elected to the Central European Council. Our own world is full of extremists of many stripes, from Al-Qaeda Islamists to anti-abortion Christianists, and I'm guessing that there aren't many on the side of "law and order" who could infiltrate their ranks so quickly and convincingly.

Quick note on Syme: surely he's the inspiration (progenitor?) for Orwell's Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four — the hyper-orderly lexicographer, the one whose goal is to remove all but the word "Ingsoc" from people's vocabulary. For now, though, Syme seems to be our hero, turning up the inconsistencies in Gregory's philosophy and outwitting his foe in the Thursday election. I hope the story has a few more twists and turns in store for us.

Onward!