I’m a huge sucker for subgenres, niche branches of cultural production that are quite specific in their parameters but nevertheless spur a fair share of outputs, with variations that are mostly of interest to devoted experts/fans, usually capturing a momentary fixation, whether it’s the cycle of distinctively post-Pulp Fiction crime comedies (including Jon Watts’ recent throwback, Wolfs, whose title is a cheeky nod to Harvey Keitel’s iconic character) or the recent strand of op eds explaining Trump’s electoral victory (which have been as formulaic and predictable as any other mass-produced literary subgenre, even as authors put their own preconceived ideological spin on each interpretation).
And so, today’s reminder that comic book covers can be awesome is yet another tribute to one of my favorite esoteric subgenres: superhero/horror hybrids.
In case you need a break and to briefly take your mind off the news, for some reason, here is another postabout scattered comics that I associate with just the kind of offbeat genre stuff this medium excels at. Too esoteric or visually wild to pull off in cinema or streaming, these aren’t necessarily masterpieces, but they sure are COMICS!
ABSOLUTION
Understandably, these have been great times for dystopic social media satires and there are others I could’ve picked (like the hilarious Death Ratio’d), but I particularly like how Absolution engages with the readers’ own contradictions. Its premise is that, in a near future, criminals get to earn absolution by going on live-streamed killing sprees while receiving votes – and outrageous comments – from the public. And so, on the one hand, we get to delight in thrilling cyberpunk violence courtesy of Mike Deodato Jr (whose layouts are full of tight rectangular grids, simulating our screen-watching POV) and Lee Loughridge (whose neon colors likewise evoke the glare of digital devices), and on the other hand, a panel of pundits and experts (along with the protagonist’s inner monologue) reflexively discuss bloodthirsty voyeurism and the ethical implications of vigilante justice. In other words, Absolution somehow works as a kickass proto-Punisher yarn as well as a provocative anti-Punisher comic!
It’s the kind of balancing act few writers can pull off, but Peter Milligan has spent a decades-long career exploring identity dilemmas in various genres, drawing on both high and lowbrow references. His work has often displayed a knack for merging hardboiled fiction with absurdist humor – and Absolution is no exception (even if the somewhat deadpan result isn’t nearly as manic and inventive as Johnny Nemo, Milligan’s previous strip about an ‘existentialist hitman of the future’).
BENEATH THE TREES WHERE NOBODY SEES
One of the most breathtaking debuts in ages, Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is a masterclass in how to take a pretty basic high concept and deliver a damn knockout comic that feels much better than it had any right to be! The premise of a clash between rival serial killers isn’t the most original, although the twist here is that it takes place in a small town with *the* *most* *adorable* anthropomorphic creatures. And sure, Horvath is also not the first to play off the contrast between, on the one hand, innocent-looking visuals and concepts that seem straight out of a children’s book and, on the other hand, utterly grueling violence…
What could’ve been a mere edgelord dark comedy, though, is elevated by the care that clearly went into all facets of this book. From the designs and mise-en-scène to the light-as-a-feather colors and pitch-perfect lettering (by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou), every single page of BTTWBS looks stunning. What’s more incredible is that the shamelessly manipulative use of cute animals, coupled with some deft characterization, totally works: not only does the gore come across as shocking and terrifying, but the psychopathic protagonist is somehow quite likeable.
BLACK WIDOW: DEADLY ORIGIN
This one is a bit older, but it fits the spirit… Deadly Origin is a high-octane spy-fi mini-series with cartoony artwork by Tom Raney and Scott Hanna, spliced with flashback snapshots – beautifully rendered and colored by John Paul Leon – covering the Black Widow’s very long life (she was born in 1928 and has extended her youth through a fantastic/convenient serum). Clearly designed to do some house-cleaning on the character’s contradictory continuity, the comic turns this challenge into a virtue, as Paul Cornell writes in his signature frenzied style, cramming new twists and information into practically every panel (the opening sequence is already relentless), so that part of the fun is precisely trying to keep up with the sheer barrage of Marvel cameos and plot threads. It helps that the main story’s framing device is itself quite wacky (it involves sexually transmitted nanites) and it’s interesting to see that, because the original series came out in 2010, Russia’s secret services still come off more like the technologically outdated remnants of a former great empire than like a cutting-edge cyber-threat with renewed expansionist designs.
The series was collected into a single book and it’s also included in the larger collection Black Widow: Widowmaker.
GRIZ GROBUS
A tomb raider on a colonized planet tries to steal a neuro-processor and ends up resurrecting a robot priest. A distracted wizard in a swords-and-sorcery world tries to conjure up a war god and, amusingly, messes up even worse. Writer-artist Simon Roy initially throws readers into these two realities without establishing their odd settings (or explaining how they are connected) and, in this day and age of endless origins, prequels, and dumbed-down exposition, I have to admit it feels damn refreshing when a creator trusts us to just jump on board for the ride and fill in the necessary blanks along the way. And so, you can add the joy of discovery to the joy of the adventure itself. Remember the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which felt like walking into the middle of an ongoing serial and was all the better for it? Same here: Roy and Jess Polard (credited as co-plotter and script editor) have come up with full worlds and rounded characters rich in backstory which we get to know – insofar as it matters – as they bond and fight and eat… (Food, in particular, plays quite a central role in both tales, which is the sort of relatable element that helps ground the fantasy.)
Since Griz Grobus’ storytelling relies so much on action and offhand remarks in the dialogue, the artwork needs to be especially efficient and expressive. Roy’s drawings – with more than a touch of anime influence – do the job and are well-served by Sergey Nazarov’s smooth colors, which nail a distinct visual identity for each of the two parallel narratives.
KNOW YOUR STATION
You get no points for guessing why the premise of 1%-style ultra-rich people fleeing from an economically and ecologically devastated Earth has inspired so many gonzo variations in recent comics. Along with the sci-fi setting’s visual possibilities, the concept has an obvious satirical dimension (not least by condensing the radical discrepancies between haves and have-nots within a self-contained space) that creators have explored through their individual sensibilities, from Van Jensen’s awesome-looking Arca and Stefano Cardoselli’s trippy Don’t Spit in the Wind all the way to Mark Russell’s and Steve Pugh’s funny Billionaire Island…
Sarah Gailey’s and Liana Kangas’ contribution to this subgenre, Know Your Station, kicks off as a locked room whodunnit inside a space station/oligarch resort, with the added twist that the investigator isn’t your usual master detective, but rather an unprepared, drug-addicted ‘security liaison’ with unreliable memory and the constant impression that she might be way over her head. This leads not only to in-your-face social commentary, but also to some nifty surprises as the resolution gleefully subverts the stakes of this type of murder mystery tale.
ZAROFF
Remember Richard Connell’s classic short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ from way back in 1924? You know, the one about a hunter who literally becomes the hunted on an island where a madman kills humans for sport? Even if you haven’t read it, I’m sure you’ve seen one of the film adaptations or one of its endless variations… And even if you haven’t, you don’t really need much background to get a kick out of Zaroff, a sequel set eight years later, in 1932, and, wisely, focusing not on the original’s boring hero but rather on its deranged villain!
It may seem odd to include in a list of comics that are COMICS an album that 1) is a follow-up to a prose story, and 2) looks incredibly ‘cinematic’ in its rhythmic editing and photo-naturalistic aesthetics. And yet, this is actually a majestic example of what you can do with drawings on paper… Sylvain Runberg clearly scripted the book to serve François Miville-Deschênes’ artwork, as most of it is just a relentless succession of action set pieces, letting him fill the book with impressively rendered vistas and thrilling adventure beats. The plot feels almost nihilistic, with a bunch of vicious characters fighting each other to the death on a jungle, the contrast with their elegant period clothes somehow giving the whole thing even more of a lurid grindhouse feel. The thing is that Miville-Deschênes’ layouts are so graceful that they create a quirky sort of tension: on the one hand, the dynamic pace makes one want to speed through the whole thing; on the other, each page is so gorgeous on its own that I just want to contemplate it at length.
The creative duo reunited for a sequel to this sequel, Zaroff’s Revenge, which jumps to the early 1940s. The tone gets even bleaker there, as they pit these games of hunted humans against a much larger version of the same game: World War II. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be Garth Ennis’ favorite comic!
First, some housekeeping: I’m still struggling to conciliate the blog with other commitments, but instead of going on yet another hiatus, I’m shifting into a biweekly rhythm, so the longer Thursday posts will now appear only every other week (the Monday cover compilations should continue to roll smoothly, though).
This is also the time of the year when I pick my favorite recent horror movie. Alas, for the same time-constraining reasons, I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping up with the genre as much I used to… Everyone keeps telling me The Substance and Longlegs deserve my attention, and I trust them, but I just haven’t gotten around to watching them yet. And that’s the thing: horror cinema has been gaining so much quality, popularity, and acclaim that I’m not sure I’d have much to add to the general discourse, anyway.
That said, I can’t resist the thematic pull of Halloween, so I figured instead I’ll just use these end-of-October posts to recommend less fashionable viewing alternatives, from obscure oddities to older classics. This time around, I’ll kick things off with one of the latter…
In the past, I’ve recommended the first Dr. Mabuse film(1922’s silent opus of German expressionism) and the final chapter of Fritz Lang’s trilogy (1960’s puzzle box of Cold War science fiction), so I may as well add, in case anyone was wondering, that the second entry in this gothic series about the titular evil genius, 1933’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, is also definitely worth your time. Sure, the fact that this is an early talkie means that, for every neat piece of sound design (like in the opening sequence), you also get some uneven pacing here and there, although I’d argue Lang more than makes up for this through his inventive visuals, including a number of comic book-worthy scene transitions.
While The Testament of Dr. Mabuse works perfectly fine as a self-contained thriller with original characters, I’m particularly fond of it as an epic sequel. Like its predecessor and its successor, the film follows a bunch of doomed figures in Dr. Mabuse’s orbit without really anchoring the narrative around a specific hero that we’re expected to identify with, despite the presence of the sarcastic Inspector Lohmann (from M, Lang’s masterpiece). As a result, the movies posit a decadent world without a clear counterpoint, where Mabuse isn’t so much a threat to a benign social order as a reflection of society’s darker side… That’s as far as the structural similarities go, though. Rather than rework the same beats all over again (like Hollywood tends to do), the story steams forward while recontextualizing the core concept.
At one point, during the previous film’s climactic shootout, Mabuse said: ‘I feel like a state inside of a state with which I’ve always been at war!’ Here, though, he’s no longer just an anarchic undercurrent, but the promise of fascist takeover – and it’s this, more than the super-powers, that elevate him into supervillain territory… and elevate The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, beyond a crime story, into chilling horror. Since we’re talking about a German film from 1933, it’s hard to disregard the parallel with the outside world, regardless of the makers’ intentions at the time. I suppose I also don’t have to spell out why it’s been on my mind this election season.
That’s it for this year’s film recommendation. Now, as a reminder that comics can be awesome, enjoy 20 hysterical covers with Jack Kirby’s giant monsters:
I get a huge kick exploring various connections within pop culture, including the thematic and stylistic links between Batman comics and cinema. To be fair, many of the comics are quite open about their influences, to the point that one of the rogues, Film Freak, once crafted a whole crime spree in Gotham City around a macabre journey through movie history, including this awesome tribute to Buster Keaton:
Catwoman (v2) #59
That said, with these posts I’m normally not interested in films that are explicitly referenced in the comics, nor am I interested in films that actually include characters from the comics (so, no, I won’t be writing about Joker: Folie à Deux for now, like I did about the first picture). Instead, I’m fascinated by movies that *feel* like they belong in the same universe as the comics, to some extent, but where Batman’s actual cast is missing from the story.
Last month, I did this exercise with a bunch of blockbusters. This time around, I’m suggesting some less obvious, less well-known works (at least outside of specific cinephile circles) that different fans of the Dark Knight should appreciate…
KISS THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS (1948)
Behind this badass title hides an uneven movie, but one with a lot to recommend. It’s a visually engaging film noir that taps into much of what made this type of expressionist crime thrillers so appealing, as a deadbeat veteran kills a guy in the very first scene, setting up a paranoid manhunt which will keep him trying to escape the authorities, the criminal underworld, and his own impulses. Interestingly, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is mostly set in Hollywood’s version of postwar London, portraying a bombed-out Britain with fuel rationing, rampant contraband, and corporal punishment, thus framing the protagonist’s own doom within a whole country struggling to recover from the recent conflict. It’s also a morality tale, to some degree, exposing the danger of uncontrolled PTSD and of being let down by the system while emphasizing the need to face the consequences of your actions and to work together to improve living conditions (Burt Lancaster even threatens an antivaxxer, at one point). More than the chiaroscuro lighting or the way the movie integrates the historical background, it’s this last feature that reminds me of some Batman narratives, namely those about recidivist criminals facing their mistakes… although in their case the redemption or comeuppance tend to come in a different form:
Ozploitation meets kung fu cinema in this propulsive, no-holds-barred action fest about an agent from Hong Kong’s Special Branch (committedly played by Jimmy Wang Yu) who goes to Australia to supervise an extradition and ends up totally trashing the place by going up against a local crime lord. There are obvious elements of copaganda (hell, the opening credits play over footage of police force training in HK) and a clear Dirty Harry influence, but also a conspicuous James Bond vibe, as Wang effortlessly beds Aussie babes (with way more tongue action than your average 007), drives around in a convertible, and remorselessly slaughters henchmen abroad (as one guy puts it: ‘This country’s got a small population and he’s getting through them very fast!’), including the most brutal of restaurant kitchen fights (sorry, Monkey Man!).
I suppose I should illustrate this one with a martial arts scene, but I can’t resist going with a classic confrontation against racist Australians:
The story of a CIA agent trying to break up an arms deal with the Vietcong may be hard to take seriously, but Password: Kill Agent Gordon doesn’t expect you to take anything very seriously – it’s all just a pretext to globetrot from Paris to Tripoli (and eventually end up in a Spanish bullfighting arena, for some reason) while kicking ass, getting laid, and playing with the Cold War, Bond-style. This one was put together by a Eurospy dream team: the director, stars, and composer were all involved in loads of similar pictures and they knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, what most reminds me of classic Batman yarns is the movie’s shameless commitment to providing constant thrills, no matter how irrelevant (or even contradictory) they may be to the plot… Just in the first few minutes, our hero is kidnapped, only to be revealed it was only his colleagues trying to surprise him, then someone points a gun at him, but it’s just a perfume advertisement, and shortly thereafter he gets attacked by a couple of thugs who, it turns out, got the wrong guy and actually wanted to beat up someone else! It really is like a faithful adaptation of those comics where practically every page finishes on a cliffhanger, which can lead either to a fake-out or to yet another bombastic fight scene.
An action-packed, ultra-convoluted cat-and-mouse game between a genius super-cop and a genius super-criminal is pretty much the foundation of the best Batman comics, so if one of my favorite directors, Johnnie To, gets on the case, you bet it’s going to show up in one of these lists sooner or later… Now, this is from when To was still a bit rough around the edges, but you can already count on his signature slick mise-en-scène and deadpan humor. What’s more, he has always been great at using small touches and visuals to signal characters growing closer to each other, and his mastery is definitely in full display here, as the ‘cat’ and the ‘mouse’ progressively bond. For all the shooting, punching, and speeding cars, Running Out of Time is ultimately a love story!
Fritz Lang directed (brilliantly) this take on the vast subgenre of psychological thrillers about women suspecting sinister things about their husbands… but instead of the typically fragile, insecure protagonist driven to the brink of madness, the awesome Joan Bennett plays the lead as ultra-determined, rational, and resourceful, taking charge of the situation even as Secret Beyond the Door gradually evolves from psychodrama to pre-giallo slasher movie. While fans of the Dark Knight are bound to appreciate the eccentricities of the twisted villain of the piece, I’m sure the main appeal will be the dark tone of the final stretch, which feels like an apotheosis of cinematic gothic horror.
Finally, this is just the sort of pulpy adventure that Batman comics occasionally went for in the Silver and Bronze Ages, with Tarzan fighting off treasure-hunting mercenaries in Mexico. Although he sports the obligatory athletic physique, this isn’t Hollywood’s iconic King of the Jungle speaking broken English, but rather an articulate, world-weary, highly intelligent version of the character (closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation). As a result, it’s not difficult to picture the Caped Crusader in this combination of brawns & brains, even if Tarzan is more willing to pick up a machine gun… That said, I’m not going to lie: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold definitely lacks both the high production values and the woke revisionism of 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan. Still, there’s an old-school charm to the proceedings. And while an early set piece involving a giant bottle could’ve been drawn by Dick Sprang, on the whole the movie is as gritty as it is campy, so I see it appealing to fans of the Haney-Aparo era of The Brave and the Bold.
As the world drastically falls apart, I suppose there is little consolation left, apart from the fact that comic books can be awesome… In particular, this week’s selection pays tribute to covers that draw on the aesthetics of pulp paperbacks, movie posters, heavy metal concerts, and all the rich tradition of eerie beauty that can be found in the schlockiest corners of pop culture!
When I’m not compulsively watching spy showson TV, spy fiction tends to occupy a sizeable portion of my reading time, so I thought I’d share a few impressions on a couple of novels that approach the genre in very different ways:
54
(Wu Ming, 2002)
“ITALIAN SOLDIERS!
The Slovenian people have launched an inexorable struggle against the occupying forces. Many of your comrades have already fallen in that struggle. And you will go on falling day after day, night after night, for as long as you remain tools in the hands of our oppressors, and until Slovenia is liberated!”
54 aims straight at so many of my pleasure centers: it’s a kaleidoscopic Cold War epic, largely set in the 1950s (in the titular year) and starring, among others, Hollywood actor Cary Grant, who gets assigned by MI6 with a mission to woo Marshall Tito, pulling communist Yugoslavia further to the West.
The book zooms in on a variety of perspectives and voices, from Grant’s Palm Beach mansion to a working-class bar in Bologna, linking up the stories of very different people in very different places (there are even a few chapters written from the point of view of a television set, in what is probably my favorite subplot). If at one point you’re following revolutionaries in divided Trieste, the next pages may be set in Bristol, or Moscow, or perhaps focus on the underworld of organized crime emerging in Naples under the command of Lucky Luciano (the real-life gangster whose fascinating saga was chronicled in Francesco Rossi’s impressive 1973 film named after him, which is basically Italy’s answer to The Godfather), yet it all gradually comes together.
Despite the many detours and occasional esoteric debates about postwar Italian and Balkan leftist politics (which I actually can’t get enough of!), there is plenty of overlap with the sort of material that usually pops up in Gotham Calling. After all, much of 54 tells the type of middlebrow international intrigue thriller that Cary Grant could’ve played in, halfway between Notorious and North by Northwest (of course, it helps that I can perfectly hear his specific tone and accent in every line of dialogue). The second half of the book does meander a bit, but it ultimately culminates in one hell of an action scene.
Moreover, Wu Ming – a collective of Italian writers – wonderfully capture Grant’s larger-than-life charisma and the idiosyncratic ego that must’ve come with it:
“How astonished he had been, in the late thirties, the man of the new century. Astonishment went hand in hand with awareness: who had never yearned for such perfection, to draw down from Plato’s Hyperuranium the Idea of ‘Cary Grant’, to donate it to the world so that the world might change, and finally to lose himself in the transformed world, to lose himself never to re-emerge? The discovery of a style and the utopia of a world in which to cultivate it.
Meanwhile, there was an Austrian dauber out there winning a career and followers, whose speeches hit the hearts of the Volk ‘like hammer-blows’, and a distant clang of weapons heralded the worst: the clash of two worlds.
Against the world of Cary Grant, the dauber had finally lost with dishonour, in a puddle of blood and shit.
Without a doubt, the Russian winter was partly responsible, but one thing was certain: the New Man, at least for the time being, wouldn’t be having to tuck his trousers into two-foot-high leather boots to march the goose-step.
The New Man, if there was such a thing, would be reflected in Cary Grant, the perfect prototype of Homo atlanticus: civil without being boring; moderate, but progressive; rich, certainly, even extremely rich, but not dry, and not flabby either.
Even some of the most vehement enemies of capitalism, of America, of Hollywood, were willing to concede that the baby was one thing, the bathwater quite another.
Cary Grant, born a proletarian and with a ludicrous name to boot, had defied fate with the ardour of the best exemplars of his class. He had denied himself as a proletarian, and now he was bringing dreams to millions. If one individual could achieve it, there was no reason why the rest of the working class shouldn’t have it as well.”
Although I quite like the passage above, and some of the others, on the whole I can’t say I’m entirely in love with Wu Ming’s writing. The prose tends to feel too didactic for my taste and the dialogue is full of heavy-handed (and sometimes repetitive) infodumps, with characters saying stuff like ‘as you well know’ and ‘as you have mentioned,’ or awkwardly name-dropping famous people and situations just for our benefit.
I realize not every reader will be as familiar as I am with the era’s geopolitics and regional culture, but there are many ways of conveying information… John le Carré, for instance, often had lengthy, talky briefing scenes with characters carefully explaining this sort of stuff to each other, but he always figured out witty ways of presenting things. Rather than a chore in the name of a necessary set-up, those moments of exposition were absorbing and entertaining by themselves.
And le Carré isn’t the only alternative. At one point, in a bit of tongue-in-cheek intertextuality, Cary Grant starts reading Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and, although his view is pretty dismissive of that novel, the contrast with the quoted excerpts does not really help. I’m not the biggest Fleming fan but, in just a few sentences, his style comes across as much tighter and incredibly gripping compared to most of 54.
I’m also a geeky, pedantic nitpicker, so I’m not fully convinced about some of Grant’s reactions. After WWII’s propaganda effort, I don’t think he’d need to be persuaded of cinema’s ability to shape people’s dreams and political ideas. And while I think the inclusion of Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief in the narrative is a happy choice (not least because that caper is also about what happened to the former antifascist resistance), I have to wonder how Grant could consider that script an unpromising vehicle for his return to the screen after a hiatus (?), given that this piece of fluff seems perfectly suited to his suave image (especially in contrast to Howard Hawk’s Monkey Business, the very silly comedy he had just starred in). Plus, there is that bit where a Soviet official complains about Hollywood’s ‘dreary war films in which the Russians never even made an appearance,’ showing an ignorance of wartime movies that I suspect the character may share with the authors.
That said, of course the most gratifying way of reading the book is to just accept that it ultimately takes place in an alternate reality, starring a parallel version of Cary Grant, so not every single detail has to match our ‘real’ world. Once I embraced this attitude, I had a lot of fun. Wu Ming’s take on Grant has a particularly amusing payoff in the coda, where a psychiatrist desperately tries to make sense of what the hell is going on in his head!
As the plot tapestry unfolds, 54 becomes an exciting read – and even a thought-provoking one, especially when you consider that it was written against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, 9/11, and Berlusconi’s first return to power, all of which linger in the subtext.
In any case, it’s hard to resist a book that features such a spirited monologue from Tito:
“It happened five years ago. Kardelj, who had had dinner with me that evening, was clarifying the issue of Leninist theory in Yugoslavia, and rejecting the accusations of ‘Trotskyism’ issuing from Moscow. The mirror spied on us from the end of the corridor, our lookalikes copying our every move, perhaps preparing to reproach us. Here we were, well fed and clothed, so unlike the days of the konspiracija. Was it just vanity that dictated the stance that would consign us to history? We discovered (at dead of night it’s inevitable) that there was something monstrous about the mirrors. Kardelj said the mirror is an infernal machine, because it separates the individual from the community, stimulating his petty-bourgeois narcissism. I replied, ‘So how do you trim your moustache, by leaning over puddles?’ adding that, on the contrary, the mirror unites the individual with the community, and its admission into proletarian houses has cemented class pride, that sense of decorum thrown back in the bosses’ faces, ‘We have been naught, we shall be all! We can be, and we are, more stylish than you are!’ It was thanks to that decorum, to that pride, that the war was won.”
THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
(G. K. Chesterton, 1908)
“The suburbs 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 skyline 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. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretentions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretentions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable.”
If 54 was chockfull of characters and events unfolding at a breakneck pace, grabbing me with the elaborate plot despite the pedestrian prose, The Man Who Was Thursday managed to pull off an even faster rhythm while consistently spitting out the wittiest turns of phrase. The narrator’s voice was sharp and piercing, like a killer’s knife, and genuinely funny, often making me laugh out loud while frantically turning the pages between cliffhangers.
So much of the joy stems from the dramatic surprises that pop up in every single chapter – hell, in every few pages – so I don’t dare reveal too much about the story, except to say that, like the novels of Joseph Conrad written at the time, at the dawn of the 20th century, it is set in the milieu of terrorists whose radicalism has at least as much do with philosophical fervor as with directly responding to working class living conditions.
For the most part, the book pits secret police agents against the Central Anarchist Council in a narrative that ticks – and even anticipates – many of the beats associated with the James Bond yarns quite a few decades later: the archvillain is a larger-than-life genius running a transnational organization whose facilities are reached through a beer bar table that shoots through the floor into a subterranean vaulted passage lined with guns.. and there are vicious fights as well as plenty of chases involving horses, cars, a balloon, and even an elephant!
That said, G.K. Chesterton ramps up the surrealism, as if already parodying the formula. His intellectual absurdist humor feels like a bridge between Voltaire’s Candide and the writings of Woody Allen, Douglas Adams, or Terry Pratchett(not to mention Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub), whom he no doubt influenced. The result is simultaneously a rollicking thriller, a slapstick comedy, and a political satire, especially when characters enthusiastically debate their ideas, like in this dialogue with a forerunner of punk nihilism:
“ ‘What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?’
‘To abolish God!’ said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. ‘We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.’
‘And Right and Left,’ said Syme with a simple eagerness, ‘I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.’ ”
There may be a twist too many. Near the end, The Man Who Was Thursday, true to the promise of the subtitle (A Nightmare), veers into stranger and stranger territory, jumping from wild farce into outright metaphysical allegory. As much as he reveled in the sense of fantastic chaos that drives much of the book, and although not unsympathetic to the plight of the masses, G.K. Chesterton was still a conservative Christian suspicious of modernity, subjectivism, and anarchy, which increasingly shines through (or, rather, it’s there from the start, but it doesn’t prevent his initial descriptions of revolutionary intellectuals, poets, and zealots from being hilarious… and oddly relatable, still today).
Honestly, I share much less with Chesterton’s worldview than I do with Wu Ming’s political leanings. And yet, at the end of the day, I had way more of a blast with this literary classic, not least because of the sheer pleasure provided by the paradoxes that fill its prose. I can’t resist adding a further quote from the opening paragraph, about the incredible Saffron Park:
“Even if the people were not “artists,” the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face—that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art.”