Gabriel Syme becomes oddly involved in a anarchistic assasination scheme. As the plot unfolds, he tries to take the measure of his co-conspirators. As loyalties alternately appear clear and cloudy, he finds himself pursued by, and pursuing in turn, a monster of a man.

Categorizing The Man Who was Thursday is tricky. It’s certainly “fiction,” but beyond that little is certain. There are elements of religious metaphor, but taken as a metaphor, the story is woefully confused and incomplete. There are elements of politics, though it is not really a political novel. In some ways it’s a thriller, but one gets the sense that thrills are more narrative device than they are core to the story.

In an afterword written nearly 30 years after the book was originally published, Chesterton drew attention to the subtitle, A Nightmare. The book “was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date…”

Even that explanation, however, isn’t fully satisfying. The story evokes mankind’s run-up to the Christian judgement a little too purposely to be written off as a description of doubt and despair. I think Chesterton was trying, hesitantly and without a clear dogma, to suggest that all of humanity fights the same battle, even if each person’s reaction to and interpretation of the battle is distinct. Some take joy in the fight, others despair or anger or resignation.