The Man Who Was Thursday

I don't know why I had never got round to reading G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday - or, come to that, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I've now repaired the first omission - and great fun it has been. Subtitled 'A Nightmare' and generally classed as a 'metaphysical thriller', The Man Who Was Thursday seems at first to be an unusually high-spirited, but recognisable, Edwardian adventure story about a chap becoming a detective and infiltrating a dangerous circle of anarchists. But the chap is more poet than policeman, and it isn't long before things get rather too strange for any kind of conventional thriller. From the very beginning - in the suburb of Saffron Park, 'on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset' - the lighting effects are superbly lurid and dramatic, not quite of this world, indeed more like 'A Nightmare'. But it's a very jolly kind of nightmare, full of comic moments and sharp wit, and building up to an all-action climax (or pre-climax) built around an epic chase (Chesterton has a Kiplingesque relish for vigorous, even violent action - as well as, of course, food and drink).
It's hard to say much about the story without spoiling the fun for those who have not yet read it, or irking those who have. It is a book full of wise and wonderful observations and paradoxes, firmly on the side of Life, the real life of real humans, and savagely against inhuman - and godless - Ideas. And it is often very funny. Here's a passage that brilliantly ridicules what is wrong with a certain way of thinking - a way of thinking still all too prevalent among today's terrorists. An anarchist has got up to address the meeting:
'Comrades,' he began, as sharp as a pistol-shot, 'our meeting tonight is important, though it need not be long. This branch has always had the honour of electing Thursdays for the Central European Council. We have elected many and splendid Thursdays. We all lament the sad decease of the heroic worker who occupied the post until last week. As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton, which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always...'
GKC himself described The Man Who Was Thursday as 'a very melodramatic sort of moonshine', adding that it was 'intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion'. No doubt both are true - but it is also the most tremendous fun.

Over at The Dabbler...

I'm on about blurb adjective inflation. It's a big, boiling post, vital, intense, unsettling and searingly honest.

Roll Over, Beethoven

I received my musical education, such as it was, in an atmosphere of Beethoven Worship. The prevailing view was that the German Romantic composers represented the summit of musical creativity, that the symphony was the supreme musical form, and that Beethoven, the great symphonist, reigned as the God of Music. Around his throne were ranged the lesser genii, most of them stars of the same Germanic firmament. Italian, French - and especially English - music were rated considerably lower, and 'early music' was strictly for cranks. In my tender years I plunged headlong into the Beethoven symphonies (and the piano sonatas) and indeed became so obsessed with the great Ludwig that for some time I scarcely looked beyond his mighty oeuvre. Schubert and Purcell I knew only for a handful of charming songs, and Bach for a few popular gems. Now, all these years later, Schubert is one of the composers I love the most (and it's his 9th symphony that I'd have as my single Desert Island Disc), Bach is another, and Purcell, I suspect, is well on his way to becoming a third. It has taken me many years to get to Purcell, but now, finally, I am beginning to explore his music - and finding beauty and wonder at every turn. Was ever an English composer so prodigiously gifted? Did anyone ever put English words to music so exquisitely, so beautifully? (How about this? Or this?) And the songs are just a part of his enormous body of work (though he died at just 36) - I have so much more to explore... It took me far too long, but I am so glad that at last I am beginning to discover the greatness of our own Purcell.

Tulip Tree

Just now, between rain showers, I was admiring the avenue of Tulip Trees in Kensington Gardens, now at the peak of its autumn glory, the colours of the leaves ranging from late green, through bright yellow and gold, all the way to a rich russet bronze. A very fine tree is the Tulip Tree, shapely and good-looking in all seasons - and, as if its beautiful foliage weren't enough, it also flowers abundantly, with the large, yellow-green tulip-shaped blossoms that give the tree its name. But what's most wonderful is that the shape of the leaf, by a rare piece of morphic rhyming, also resembles the outline of... a tulip.

Enjoy...

... these pictures from the Ghosts Of Gone Birds exhibition that's on in Shoreditch - artists' visions of extinct birds. Some of them are lovely, I think - and some very funny (and some both).

100 Per Cent

From the train window I caught sight of a poster. It portrayed a chap in, I suppose, early middle age sitting at a desk looking important but approachable. A chap best described as one of life's smug gits. The legend ran thus: 'I ask my team for 100 per cent. If they give me more, that's good too.' I've no idea what it was advertising - perhaps a course in elementary arithmetic? But I thought what a wheeze it would be to get a copy and put it up over my Nigecorp desk. Then I thought, no, on the whole I'd prefer to see out my working life with my limbs still attached to my body...

Desecration

Sadly the suburban demiparadise I call home was in the news yesterday, for the worst of reasons - featuring in a report on vandalised war memorials.
A couple of weeks ago, the fine plain memorial that overlooks the ponds was stripped of the bronze plaques naming our war dead, prised out and taken for scrap (and probably worth no more than £50). Much can be said about the downward path from demystification to ethical relativism to moral nihilism - but what could more eloquently symbolise a culture where nothing is sacred than a vandalised war memorial? The depth of pain and outrage such an act inflicts on a community is beyond calculation - and sadly, in this case, the stripping of the brass was not the first act of desecration. Last year the York stone paving from around the memorial was laboriously jemmied up and carted away. Happily a local firm replaced the stones free of charge - an act demonstrating that, of course, all is not lost. Not yet. The brass will probably have to be replaced with stone plaques (of not too valuable stone) - just as, all over the country, churches are now obliged to replace the stolen lead on their roofs with something less attractive to passing scumbags. We must not despair.