I came to this one late — it had already been on the list for months before I read it, sitting there with a subtitle that should have told me everything: A Nightmare.

It is sold as a thriller and it behaves like one, at least for the first third. Then Chesterton starts doing something I did not expect: every anarchist Syme encounters turns out to be, like him, a detective sent to infiltrate the same council. There are no anarchists. There are only people who believed there were anarchists and arranged themselves accordingly.

That should be a punchline. It is, but it is also something else — a formal argument running underneath the comedy, which is that the enemy you have organised your life around resisting might not exist in the form you imagined.

The ending refuses to settle. Sunday is whatever Sunday is — Chesterton gestures at an answer and the answer dissolves before you can hold it. A hundred years of readers have argued about whether this is a flaw or the only intellectually honest conclusion available. I find I cannot decide, which suggests Chesterton knew what he was doing.

It is funnier than any book with this much anxiety in it has a right to be.

— G. H. Schreiber 

28/09/2025