G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday and Seven Suspects

I have already said much that I have to say about Chesterton in general upon reading Selected Father Brown Stories, to wit: That he is a much better philospher than detective writer. The books are filled with little errors in judgement, of the sort that one sees in amateurish Hollywood blockbusters---nothing terrible, just occassionally forgetting to tell us something, or omitting some detail that would have made the scene easier to track. Jarring at most, as if the cinematographer had mistaken the line of sight and confused the audience about who was speaking to whom for a moment.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, it is just as well that his prose is not airtight, for his stories are never really detective stories at all. They are always philisophical, almost religious, in bent, and the crime is mere bait or frosting, depending on his intent. I had forgotten this as I began to read The Man Who Was Thursday, so it was only natural that his implausible dialogue, his seeming misrememberance of earlier established facts, were vexing at first. It was only after I remembered that it is folly to read Chesterton as fiction that I began to truly enjoy this remarkable novella. What he offers is not a detective story at all, but an allegory that offers all the pleasures of allegory--the fine, confluent detail, the overlapping and interlocking symbolism--without much of its didacticism. I can't help but feel that it would have been better undisguised.

The stories in Seven Suspects are a little more passable, and one could almost overlook the mysticism if careless. After reading Thursday, however, my pump was primed, and I sought it everywhere. Nor was I dissapointed. A passage that still brings chills, even upon multiple readings:

Do you remember when we last met at that theatre and I told you that I always liked the picture on the curtain as much as the scenes of the play. . . from any other angle I should see that it was only a painted rag. That is how I feel about this world, as i see it from this mountain. Not that it is not beautiful, for after all a curtain can be beautiful. Not even that it is unreal, for after all a curtain is real. But only that it is thin, and that the things behind it are the real drama" (The Tower of Treason).

How perfectly this parallels my own thinking lately. Taken literally, all that we seem to perceive is but a trick of light. The space between particles of matter is so much exponentially bigger than the matter itself, we may as well be looking at an image projected onto a cloud or water vapor. And if we allow it to, the light is constantly altering what we seem to see, as a shadow falls across it, or as our eyes change their focus, or as the light itself changes. Every visual image we have is quite literally a trick of the light, an optical illusion. It has no reality, and is rather more like Chesterton's theater curtain than anything else. Better yet, perhaps it is more like a scrim, that peculiar sort of theater screen that is opaque when lit from the front, but translucent lit from behind. If the light hits it just right, all that we seem to perceive could instantly disappear to reveal something else, something that may or may not be more real, but would at least be different.