G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (2005, eBooksLib)
eBook
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2005 by eBooksLib.
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical.
“The whole gave him a sensation, the vividness of which he could not explain, that Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes.”
A very strange tale that turns from a crime story to a farce to an expressionist play to a Christian-philosophical treatise. It somehow manages to stay perfectly coherent throughout, with the unbelievable end scene a quite logical last step in a sequence of ever more outrageous scenes. Still, it leaves a somewhat sad feeling to see the fun and whimsy of the first half be pushed aside by the more serious and self-important realisations of the second, and the final impression is of a lecture received after setting out for a light distraction.
