You know a writer has made their mark when their name ends up becoming used as an adjective: Dickensian and Orwellian spring to mind of course, but we also occasionally see Shavian to describe George Bernard Shaw’s didactic commitment to social purpose, Wellsian to describe a futurism reminiscent of H G Wells, or Tolkienesque for anything with elves or wizards in it. My favourite is Kafkaesque, which describes a nightmarish bureaucratic dystopia, a familiar theme to anyone who has tried to sort out a non-standard transaction with PayPal.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a German-Jewish family in Prague and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. His work typically features characters facing surrealistic predicaments and faceless bureaucratic powers, and thus Kafka explores themes of alienation and existential anxiety. Few of his works were published in his lifetime, and all his best-known works such as Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle) were published posthumously. In fact, Kafka had instructed in his will that these unpublished works be destroyed but, fortunately for posterity, his friend and executor Max Brod ignored his wishes.
I read The Castle as a young man travelling the world and spending lots of time in consulates procuring visas, and I remember being hooked. Fortunately, although I spent many an hour in consular waiting areas, my own experience of bureaucracy never matched that of “K.”, the unfortunate protagonist who arrives in a village and struggles to make headway with the shady authorities who govern from the castle on the hill.
K. spends much of the novel trying to secure a meeting with Klamm, the elusive official who might – just might – be able to stamp the necessary forms and obtain for K. his hoped-for residency in the village. Sadly, K. is frustrated at every turn, not least by Klamm’s gatekeeping secretary, Momus.
The novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death from tuberculosis in 1924, though Kafka apparently told Max Brod that K. would continue to grapple with the castle authorities until his death: they would notify him on his deathbed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there”. A suitably ironic conclusion.
A whole new generation of kids studying GCSE English are discovering J B Priestley’s 1945 play, An Inspector Calls. It seems to be everywhere at the moment: as well as being on the syllabus in schools, the National Theatre’s production of the play was doing the rounds again nationally when the lockdown hit. Sadly, I just missed out on that, having seen the poster too late, but I did find a DVD of the 1954 film for a quid in a charity shop, and snapped it up.
You may well be familiar with the story: set in 1912 in a well-to-do northern Midlands household, in a society divided by class distinction, we find the Birling family assembled in celebration of their daughter Sheila’s engagement to Gerald Croft. The patriarch, Arthur Birling, is feeling pleased with himself, as his business is doing well and he is on an upward social trajectory, improved even more by the social standing of the Croft family into which Sheila is marrying. Their evening, however, is interrupted by the arrival of Inspector Goole (“Poole” in the film version).
The Inspector, played masterfully by Alistair Sim in the 1954 film, has some questions for all the members of the family and Gerald Croft, in turn, concerning a girl who has just committed suicide in the grisly manner of drinking bleach, a sign of her desperate mental state. It becomes apparent that each person has had some involvement with this poor girl, albeit in a variety of different circumstances, and each has played some part in her descent and degradation. The unfolding of the storyline is subtle and we the audience are gradually drawn in as details are revealed and it dawns on us that everyone present has some connection.
Tellingly, the characters react differently to Inspector Goole’s revelations. The older ones refuse to accept their responsibility; the younger ones — Sheila in particular — approach an epiphany. Priestley lays bare the self-importance of the older generation of the Birlings without flinching. It is a brilliant deconstruction of the human condition.
Here is Alistair Sim (better known perhaps for his cross-dressing comedy performances in the St Trinian’s movies) in a characteristically compelling scene from the film.
In common with many, I first discovered Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children via the popular film version made in 1970 and broadcast on TV on and off ever since. I can conjure up many moving images from that movie that remind me of the seventies: the two heavily-petticoated girls and their short-trousered brother bounding down hills, flagging down trains with red, homemade flags ; the good-hearted and proud station master played by Bernard Cribbins; the emotional reunion of Bobbie with her father on a steam-covered platform. The book version I didn’t read until relatively recently, reading it out loud to my daughter over the course of several evenings – and we both loved it.
You probably know the story: it revolves around a family who move from London up to rural Yorkshire into a house near the railway station, after the father, who works at the Foreign Office, is imprisoned after being falsely accused of spying. The children befriend a chap they call the Old Gentleman who regularly takes the 9:15 train near their home; he is eventually able to help prove their father’s innocence, and the family is reunited. The family also takes care of a Russian exile, Mr Szczepansky, who came to England looking for his family and Jim, the grandson of the Old Gentleman, who suffers a broken leg in a tunnel.
The book was first serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and then published in book form in the following year. It’s interesting to pick up on possible inspirations from news that was current at the time. The theme of an innocent man being falsely imprisoned for espionage, but finally vindicated, may well have been influenced by the Dreyfus Affair, which had been a prominent news item a few years before the book was written. Nesbit will have aligned herself, no doubt, with Émile Zola’s famous open letter in support of the wrongly-accused Alfred Dreyfus, J’Accuse.
Nesbit’s own involvement in politics also provided inspiration. Nesbit was a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society in 1894 (she even named her son Fabian). She was friends with two real-life Russian dissidents, Sergius Stepniak and Peter Kropotkin, an amalgamation of whom Nesbit probably had in mind for her Mr Szczepansky.
We also see references to the then-current Russo-Japanese War, in which Japan successfully halted Tsar Nicholas II from tightening his grip on Manchuria and Korea, and Nesbit has an opportunity to subtly express her hostile opinions of Tsarist Russia. I’m not sure if Nesbit’s other books (she published around 60 books of children’s literature, including the Psammead series and the Bastable series) similarly reveal subtle political threads within them but you wouldn’t be surprised now, would you?
Here’s the clip from the film where Bobbie (Jenny Agutter) spies her returning father amidst the steam on the platform and runs to him crying “Daddy, my Daddy”. I well up every time.
One of life’s great pleasures is reading to your children at bedtime, and your blogger, accordingly, has read many a children’s story to his own girls (and provided, incidentally, many an amusing voice to bring characters to life and make the story more interesting – I didn’t live through years of Jackanory for nothing, you know!). Some of the books we read were contemporary, and some were hardy perennials from bygone eras enjoyed by preceding generations. One of the latter, from nearly a hundred years ago now, and which stands out as a paragon of charm is Joyce Lankester Brisley’s 1920s collections of stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy, the little girl in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof.
To this day, from time to time in our house, we return to Milly-Molly-Mandy and read one of her stories, each one a miniature masterpiece and the literary equivalent of comfort food. Now, it is pretty obvious that these stories are not “relevant” to today, and they are vulnerable to claims of sentimentality and a rose-tinted depiction of a simple and long-gone world. But such objections don’t matter a jot to a child to whom the story is being read; nor to me, the narrator, frankly. Children don’t need “relevance”; they need to be transported…and Joyce Lankester Brisley’s world certainly does that.
We are invited into a world of rural charm, in an unnamed village with a school, a blacksmith’s, a grocer’s, and a baker’s, along with copious fields used as shortcuts by Milly-Molly-Mandy, Little Friend Susan, Billy Blunt, and Toby the dog, as they walk to and from school or run errands for Mother. Each story begins with “Once upon a time”, and is followed by reassuringly unspectacular goings-on in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s life, be it running to the shops with a sixpence for a skein of wool for Grandma, feeding milk to a baby hedgehog, or having a picnic in a hollowed-out tree trunk with her friends.
The magic lies in the way Joyce Lankester Brisley weaves her simple stories, the words and phrases she uses, and the charming illustrations, drawn by the author herself, that accompany the narrative. Such simple childhood pastimes as “mending” a puddle by adding pebbles and stones into it, or getting wet and flapping and quacking like ducks: who doesn’t relate to that?
So to those to whom Milly-Molly-Mandy’s world is still culturally comprehensible, be warned: these stories can give you a lump in your throat, as you mourn a disappeared world trodden underfoot by the pitiless forces of modernism and globalism! Nevertheless, the stories are an absolute delight and solidly deserve their place in the pantheon of childhood literature.
When my wife and I first met and struck out on that long process of getting to know one another, one of the questions that came up at some point was: what was your favourite children’s book? Amazingly, we chose the same one — The Otterbury Incident by C Day Lewis — and this coincidence was compounded by the fact that neither of us knew anyone else who had even heard of this book, never mind read it or cherished it as their favourite.
In my case, the book, I believe, was on a bookshelf at primary school and I guess I must have borrowed it, or perhaps it was read by the whole class (the great span of time that has elapsed since then has, alas, greyed out the specifics…though looking it up, I see that it was in fact on the UK Department of Education reading list for 1972!). In any event, I came to own it, as did my wife, and to this day both copies sit alongside each other on one of our daughters’ own bookshelf. So what was it that captured our imaginations?
Written in 1948, it is a story set in the fictional small provincial town of Otterbury, shortly after the Second World War. Although the town had been largely untouched by the war, it had sustained an accidental hit from a German bomb leaving a bomb-site (known as the “Incident”) which is used for war-games by two rival gangs of boys (Ted’s Company and Toppy’s Company) from the local school. A plot involving some stolen money draws the boys into conflict with local spiv Johnny Sharp and his sleazy accomplice “the Wart”, and a series of events lead the boys on a mission to uncover illegal goings-on in the town. An exciting denouement involves a raid on dodgy local businessman Skinner’s yard (with the rival gangs now collaborating against the common enemy) and his illegal activities are busted wide open, with everything pretty much wrapped up just as the police arrive.
Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis) was primarily a poet (and indeed was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972) but he also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. He only ever wrote two books for children (the other is 1933’s Dick Willoughby), but The Otterbury Incident is pitched perfectly for young minds, and its characterisation is engaging.
Then there are the illustrations by Edward Ardizzone: simple, charming, evocative. My wife says her first conception of what a “spiv” looked like (even before Private Walker from Dad’s Army, presumably!) came from the illustration of Johnny Sharp. We recently visited the Hepworth in Wakefield and saw an exhibition of lithographs from the School Prints scheme in the forties (an interesting story in its own right). One of the prints featured some sketched figures whose style jumped out as strangely familiar…looking up Ardizzone’s name we saw that indeed it was one and the same artist responsible for those images from our youth. So, to both writer and illustrator, we salute you!
The introduction is a masterclass in summarisation: in two paragraphs the whole story and its characters are set up perfectly.
Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop — that’s what Rickie, our English master, told me when it was settled I should write the story. It sounds simple enough. But what was the beginning? Haven’t you wondered about where things start? I mean, take my story. Suppose I say it all began when Nick broke the classroom window with his football. Well, OK, but he wouldn’t have kicked the ball through the window if we hadn’t just got super-heated by winning the battle against Toppy’s company. And that wouldn’t have happened if Toppy and Ted hadn’t invented their war game, a month before. And I suppose they’d not have invented their war game, with tanks and tommy guns and ambushes, if there hadn’t been a real war and a stray bomb hadn’t fallen in the middle of Otterbury and made just the right sort of place — a mass of rubble, pipes, rafters, old junk etc — for playing this particular game. The place is called ‘The Incident’ by the way. But then you could go back further still and say there wouldn’t have been a real war if Hitler hadn’t come to power. And so on and so on, back into the mists of time. So where does any story begin?
I asked Rickie about this, and he said, ‘Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge’ — which incidentally was contradicting what he’d said first. ‘Start with the morning you kids had the battle and Nick broke the window’ he said. When Mr Richards calls us ‘kids’, nobody objects: he’s a decent chap, as schoolmasters go; and it’s quite true we’re young — even Ted and Toppy aren’t fourteen yet. But when Johnny Sharp and the Wart strolled past our ambush on the Incident that morning, and Johnny Sharp said in his sneering way, ‘You kids up to your games again? Flipping heroes, ain’t we all?’ our blood fairly boiled, as you can imagine. We may be kids. But it was us kids who raised more than £5 for the broken window, and us kids who tracked down a gang of crooks and incidentally were thanked in public by Inspector Brook. So there’s the start of my novel. You’ve got to have a title before you can start, I mean, and personally I think The Otterbury Incident is a smashing title.
Erskine Childers’ novel, The Riddle of the Sands, has a reasonable claim to have been the first true spy novel. Published in 1903, it enjoyed huge popularity in Britain in the years leading up to the First World War. Taking its cue from the adventure tales of Rider Haggard and R M Ballantyne, Childers’ novel contains less of the derring-do of those writers but lots more realistic detail and intrigue and thus more authenticity. This formula would be used later to great effect by such espionage writers as John Buchan and Ian Fleming.
When Charles Carruthers (it had to be “Carruthers”, right?) accepts an invitation from old Oxford chum Arthur Davies, to take a yachting and duck-shooting trip to the Frisian Islands (the archipelago at the eastern edge of the North Sea), he has no idea their holiday will become a daredevil investigation into a German plot to invade Britain. The action is centred around the large area of coastal waterway that is the Schleswig fiords, characterised by hundreds of channels and inlets and ever-shifting sandbanks that lend themselves to skilled navigators only. They lend themselves to secretive plots too, as it turns out, and when Carruthers and Davies stumble upon mysterious goings-on, we are drawn into a classic spy adventure in which the German plot to invade Britain is revealed…and of course eventually foiled. The ability to use boats in this environment is a secret weapon, and Davies, despite his eccentricity, is a gifted sailor. The minutiae of sailing and navigation throughout the book is engrossing.
The novel predicted the threat of war with Germany and was so prescient in its identification of the British coast’s defensive weaknesses that it came to influence the siting of new naval bases. As an aside, the story of its author is quite remarkable. Rather than following up the novel with a host of sequels as might have been expected (a sort of nautical equivalent of Biggles perhaps?), Childers instead entered politics. Quite bizarrely, since the novel is all about patriotic struggles for king and country, its writer eventually became a fervent Irish nationalist and was considered a traitor by the British government at the time of his death. He was executed by a firing squad in 1922, by order of the Irish Free State.
However, it is the novel that Childers will be chiefly remembered for, and I have selected as an excerpt the initial letter from Davies to Carruthers inviting him out to the Frisian Islands. It gives us an intriguing flavour of the adventure to come, plus an amusing insight into Davies’ scattergun psychology. It makes me want to grab an oilskin and a pipe and a pouch of “Raven mixture” and join the machinations!
Withers demurely handed me a letter bearing a German postmark and marked ‘Urgent’. I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as I sat down to open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the blotted legend: ‘Very sorry, but there’s one other thing—a pair of rigging screws from Carey and Neilson’s, size 1–3/8, galvanized.’ Here it is:
Yacht Dulcibella,
Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Sept. 21.
Dear Carruthers,—
I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing from me, as it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely, too, that what I’m going to suggest won’t suit you, for I know nothing of your plans, and if you’re in town at all you’re probably just getting into harness again and can’t get away. So I merely write on the off chance to ask if you would care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and, I hope, duck-shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I sort of remember that you have done some yachting too, though I rather forget about that. This part of the Baltic —the Schleswig fiords — is a splendid cruising-ground — A1 scenery — and there ought to be plenty of duck about soon, if it gets cold enough. I came out here via Holland and the Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to leave me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want to lay up yet for a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if you could come. If you can, send me a wire to the P.O. here. Flushing and on by Hamburg will be your best route, I think. I’m having a few repairs done here, and will have them ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your gun and a good lot of No. 4’s; and would you mind calling at Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring some oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and trousers — not the ‘yachting’ brand; and if you paint bring your gear. I know you speak German like a native, and that will be a great help. Forgive this hail of directions, but I’ve a sort of feeling that I’m in luck and that you’ll come. Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish. Good-bye.
Yours ever, Arthur H. Davies.
Would you mind bringing me out a prismatic compass, and a pound of Raven mixture?
I pulled out the letter again, and ran down its impulsive staccato sentences, affecting to ignore what a gust of fresh air, high spirits, and good fellowship this flimsy bit of paper wafted into the jaded club-room. On re-perusal, it was full of evil presage — ‘A1 scenery’ — but what of equinoctial storms and October fogs? Every sane yachtsman was paying off his crew now. ‘There ought to be duck’ — vague, very vague. ‘If it gets cold enough’ — cold and yachting seemed to be a gratuitously monstrous union. His pals had left him; why? ‘Not the “yachting” brand’; and why not? As to the size, comfort, and crew of the yacht — all cheerfully ignored; so many maddening blanks. And, by the way, why in Heaven’s name ‘a prismatic compass’?
I discovered Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22 way back in my early twenties and went on to re-read it in that decade at least once, maybe twice. It is placed squarely on that literary pedestal known as “the great American novel” and with some justification, since it regularly tops polls and even the BBC’s Big Read survey in 2003 (the biggest single test of public reading taste to date) had it ranked number 11 in the UK’s best-loved books. It is a darkly humorous and absurdist satire, that excoriates the illogical nihilism of war, and it does it masterfully.
I won’t attempt a plot summary, so let me just briefly frame the story. The novel follows the exploits of the fictional American 256th fighter squadron, stationed on the island of Pianosa in Italy’s Tuscan archipelago, during the height of World War II. With a huge cast of characters and a narrative that switches viewpoints and chronology on a regular basis, Heller creates a delicious mix of absurdity and hilarity.
Chief lunatic in the asylum is Captain John Yossarian, bomber pilot, whose main ambition in life is to stay alive (“live forever or die in the attempt”). Yossarian doesn’t distinguish between the “enemy” and his superiors; as far as he’s concerned, the enemy is anybody who’s going to get him killed, no matter which side they’re on, and he concocts a series of ingenious, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, methods for avoiding the suicidal bombing missions. In so doing, the Yossarian character acts as the conscience of the story; his is the voice of reason and righteous anger against the war and the faceless bureaucracy that pulls its strings. It is that Kafkaesque bureaucracy that thwarts his and others’ attempts to avoid dangerous situations, most notably with the infamous Catch-22.
A catch-22, of course, is a paradoxical situation from which a person cannot escape due to its contradictory rules. It is perhaps notable that the phrase, coined by Heller, has become part of the lexicon; life is indeed full of such situations (“how do I gain experience in a job if I am always turned down for not having any experience?”). In the book it is used in a variety of different formulations to justify some military requirement or other. Incidentally, Heller’s original title was Catch-18 but for reasons of euphony (and the release of another book, Leon Uris’s Mila 18) it was changed to Catch-22. Here’s an example of how the catch works.
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
Consisting of over half a million words, spread over 1200 plus pages of small print, and involving around 600 characters (including roughly 160 historical figures), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace enjoys almost mythical status as the archetypically monumental novel that most people either casually have on their list of books to tackle one day, or who wouldn’t dream of taking on. It is one of the most famous works of literature in history and generally considered to be an absolute masterpiece.
War and Peace is certainly a challenging read and not one to be tackled lightly. I came across it in a pile of second-hand books left by fellow travellers in a hotel in Peru, of all places, and realised that here was my opportunity to take it on (there must have been quite a few people over the years who have read it whilst on a gap year). Anticipating a slog, but not expecting to derive any actual pleasure from it, I dived in. What a pleasant surprise! Despite some admittedly distended and meandering passages on historiography and some lengthy military minutiae, I found it a thrilling read. It is historical novel, family chronicle, and philosophical treatise, all rolled into one, centred around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and featuring the intertwined lives of the Bezuhov, Bolkonsky, Rostov and Kuragin families.
If you want to understand the big picture, thinks Tolstoy, you have to examine the details – which is exactly what he did. He studied countless manuscripts, letters, and diaries, and visited all the sites where the battles (Schöngrabern, Austerlitz, Borodino) took place, drawing maps of the area and interviewing locals who had lived through the war. The novel is so long and detailed because he believed that that was the only way to tell this story. To do it justice, the canvas had to be broad.
So War and Peace demands patience and focus, but if you are willing to accept those conditions, it is well worth the effort. If you’re in the market for an epic work encompassing love, war, religion, family, class, history, and philosophy, you could do worse than to bump it up that “must read” list of yours.
This is one of my wife’s favourite works of literature, and whilst reading it she was intrigued to the point of obsession by its descriptive majesty concerning the whale hunter’s trade. Not that Sal is an adherent of whale killing, you understand, but in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick no stone is left unturned in his descriptions of life at sea for a nineteenth century whaler, and to read the book, as I did myself later, is a fascinating voyage indeed.
D H Lawrence called it the “greatest book of the sea ever written”. It is a sweeping and detailed study of the obsessive quest by the enigmatic one-legged Captain Ahab to track down and kill the elusive white whale that was responsible for his missing limb. The ship that Ahab captains is the Pequod, leaving the Maryland port of Nantucket on a whaling expedition and crewed by veterans of this toughest of careers: expeditions typically lasted six months or more, often years (the longest whaling voyage is believed to be that of the Ship Nile from 1858 to 1869 — eleven years!).
The narrative voice is that of Ishmael (Call me Ishmael…the novel’s famous opening line) and he has signed up with the Pequod amid an array of colourful characters. Nantucketers rub shoulders with Polynesians, American Indians, Africans; harpooneers with boatsteerers; blacksmiths with carpenters…and all of them under the absolute control and command of Ahab. Ishmael may be a “green hand” but he is evidently a widely read man, as the literary and Biblical allusions fly thick and fast, alongside a dizzying array of technical expositions, cetological lore, and abundant nautical vocabulary and seaman’s slang.
Long regarded in the last century as a “Great American Novel”, the book was actually a commercial failure during Melville’s lifetime and had only sold about three thousand copies by the time of his death. Like many works of genius, it perhaps needed the rest of the world to “catch up” with it its broad sweep.
In any event, here’s a pivotal encounter with Moby Dick himself in which Ahab’s demented obsession is starkly manifested.
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
“Befooled, befooled!”–drawing in a long lean breath–“Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.–Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die–Down, men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.–Where’s the whale? gone down again?”
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,–which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.
“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
G K Chesterton is best known for his series of quirky stories about amateur sleuth and Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown. However, it is his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday which is for me his abiding masterpiece, a piece of literature I have returned to perhaps five or six times in order to recapture its delicious prose and otherworldliness. I even put this old and wonderfully designed book cover onto a T‑shirt!
At first glance, The Man Who Was Thursday is a suspenseful mystery story, a thriller, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no mere detective story; little is as it seems in this mystery, and we find ourselves in deeper waters than expected. The novel’s subtitle offers us a clue to this: A Nightmare.
Gabriel Syme is a poet and a police detective; Lucien Gregory, a poet and bomb-throwing anarchist. At the beginning of the novel, Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and gets himself elected to it as “Thursday,” one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, in the sudden full knowledge of a hamstrung and petrified Gregory.
Syme soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and even as the masks come off, the biggest question – for both the reader and the characters – is who is Sunday? What is the true identity of the larger than life character who is the supreme head of the anarchists? The story unfolds thrillingly, and throughout it all we are treated to Chesterton’s exuberant prose, clever dialogue and gripping style. His wit shines through every scene.
Let’s read an example of this style, and how Chesterton constructs a creeping sense of jeopardy. Syme, the detective who is disguised as a poet, has engaged the anarchist Gregory and, on condition of having sworn himself to absolute secrecy, is taken to meet the highly dangerous anarchist council. Just prior to the arrival of the rest of the anarchists, Syme lets Gregory into his own secret…
“Gregory, I gave you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same kind?”
“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.
“Yes,” said Syme, very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to the anarchists?”
“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”
“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you swear?”
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said abruptly—
“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.
“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard.”
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.
“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear your friends coming.”
G K Chesterton
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