eBook, 172 pages
en language
Published 2019
Poet Gabriel Syme believes in the beauty of order and, as such, is recruited by Scotland Yard to an anti-anarchist police corp. While undercover, Syme meets fellow poet Lucian Gregory, a verse writer devoted to disorder, who introduces him to London’s anarchist underworld. Just as Gregory is to be elected to the central council, Syme’s cover is revealed and he is forced to make a decision that sends the cabal into chaos. Is anyone in this underground faction who or what they seem? Syme suddenly realizes he doesn’t have all the answers.
G. K. Chesterton’s masterpiece unfolds itself as a marvel of disguises: political parable, detective novel, Edwardian gothic, spy thriller, and metaphysical mystery—a byzantine maze of deception and subterfuge that surprises to this day.
“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.
