Audiobook · read by volunteers
Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Read by Zachary Brewster-Geisz · 16 chapters · 6 h 00
About the book
Gabriel Syme is a poet who becomes a policeman, and he is soon recruited into a secret force fighting an anarchist conspiracy at the heart of London. After a quarrel over the purpose of poetry with another poet, Lucian Gregory, Syme finds himself inside a council of seven men who each go by the name of a day of the week. He is Thursday. What follows is a chase, a nightmare and a metaphysical joke: nothing in this book is quite what it seems, and every certainty is overturned. G. K. Chesterton calls it a nightmare, and it is a wildly inventive, funny and thought-provoking one. Sixteen tracks and about six hours, read by one volunteer, are enough to take you on a strange journey through the city and beyond. Expect paradoxes, pursuits and a surprising ending that rewards a second listen.
Introduction
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who lived from 1874 to 1936, was an English writer of extraordinary range. He produced novels, essays, poems, biographies and the Father Brown detective stories, and he was famous for his paradoxes and his genial, argumentative style. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare was published in 1908.
The novel is set in a surreal, turn-of-the-century London. Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited to a secret anti-anarchist task force at Scotland Yard. In the first chapters he argues with Lucian Gregory, an anarchist poet, over the purpose of poetry, and the angry Gregory takes him to a local anarchist meeting place to prove that he is a true anarchist. Syme, however, uses his wits and is elected as the local representative to the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists, a council of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week.
The book is dedicated to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a friend of Chesterton’s, with a poem, and the dedication is the first track of the recording. Readers have long debated its meaning, which touches on order, rebellion, faith and the nature of evil. It can be enjoyed as a comic thriller or a philosophical fable.
This LibriVox edition has sixteen tracks, beginning with the dedication poem, and lasts about six hours. It is read by a single volunteer, Zachary Brewster-Geisz. Chesterton’s love of paradox and his brisk humour make it a book that is easy to listen to and hard to forget.
Public domain
G. K. Chesterton died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text