John Gray on G K Chesterton:
"...Though some have tried to interpret The Man Who Was Thursday
as a type of Christian allegory, the world it describes has more in common with
the interminable labyrinth of Kafka's Castle. In the orderly Christian cosmos,
in which Chesterton wanted to believe, nothing is finally tragic, still less
absurd. The world is a divine comedy, the ultimate significance of which is
never in doubt. In The Man Who Was Thursday, the world is illegible and may
well be nonsensical. This was the nightmare he struggled, for the most part
successfully, to forget. Producing a succession of wearisome polemics and
mechanical paradoxes, he spent his life denying the vision that informed his
greatest work...."
Artist: Sofia Warren, The New Yorker, March 2019