Anarchy in the UK

FICTION BEING, if it's done right, a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it is generally the novelists who respond last to historical events. Only in the past year have American novels like Jonathan Safran Foer's ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and Michael Cunningham's ''Specimen Days" taken up the theme of 9/11--and in Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan's ''Saturday" and Chris Cleave's ''Incendiary" marks the beginning of an imaginative response to those events.

McEwan's book begins with a flaming airplane over Heathrow (a false alarm, as it turns out) and proceeds to weave its narrative in and out of the enormous antiwar demonstration that took place in London on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003. The first line of Cleave's ''Incendiary" is ''Dear Osama": It is written in the form of a letter to Bin Laden by a woman whose son and husband have just perished in a terrorist attack on London. The book's appearance in the same week as the deadly bombings of 7/7--London's first wound in the War On Terror--gave it an air of grim premonition.

A century ago, Britain's novelists were in a similar place. Joseph Conrad's ''The Secret Agent" and G.K. Chesterton's ''The Man Who Was Thursday" (published within six months of one another) both concerned themselves with London and with terror. The chief bomb-throwers of Conrad's and Chesterton's time, unlike our own, made no claims to godliness; on the contrary, they were militant atheists. They were, to be precise, anarchists, and in the last decade of the 19th century they managed to assassinate the heads of state of France, Spain, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Anarchist bombs had also gone off in the London Underground, the Paris stock exchange and a Madrid theater.

By 1908, when ''The Man Who Was Thursday" was published, the worst of what the London Times called ''the anarchist epidemic" was over. The movement was riddled with police infiltrators, and subsequent to the Aliens Act of 1905 Great Britain--regarded internationally as an asylum for anarchists--had at last begun to deport agitators and undesirables. In the popular imagination, however, the caped and stalking anarchist, cradling bombs that (as Chesterton wrote) ''looked like the bulbs of iron plants, or the eggs of iron birds," remained a vivid figure.

The theme of ''The Secret Agent"--a botched bombing and its consequences--had been suggested to Conrad by events in 1894, when an anarchist named Martial Bourdin accidentally blew himself up in an attempt to dynamite London's Greenwich Observatory. Terror is not always efficient: The bungling jihadists of July 21, whose failed attacks on the London transport system essentially imitated--right down to the targeting of three locations on the Underground and one red bus--the lethal events of two weeks before, would have been familiar figures to Conrad. As Ramzi Mohamed, Hussain Osman, et al, rushed into history with their misfired devices fuming idly behind them, the words of the professor in ''The Secret Agent"--a devout bomb-maker--hung mockingly in the air: ''You can't expect a detonator to be absolutely foolproof."

The Chestertonian terrorist is another thing again: He is a figure in a dark cosmic comedy. Chesterton, a prolific journalist, poet, and critic, was never afraid to take a serious subject unseriously--it was part of his metaphysic, as it were. ''There seems to be some sort of idea," he wrote in 1908, ''that you are not treating a subject properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms and defend it by grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or eight angels...."

Though there are real anarchists in ''The Man Who Was Thursday," the main joke of the novel is that the secret London-based conclave of European Dynamiters, infiltrated by the poet-detective Gabriel Syme, is in fact made up entirely of police double agents, each of whose real identity is unknown to the others. The enigmatic and physically enormous Sunday (each member of the conclave is named for a day of the week) has a deeper kind of doubleness. He is simultaneously the president of the Central Anarchist Council and he is an important policeman--perhaps the most important policeman.

''The Man Who Was Thursday" is uncategorizable: a wild hash of allegory, theology, social philosophy, and cultural criticism, all delivered with the skill of a vintage epigrammist. (''Thieves respect property," declares one character. ''They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.") We should be wary of dismissing it as unreal, however. A London which permitted the extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri--who is fighting extradition to the United States on terrorism charges--to stand in the street and preach holy war might be interested in the conduct of Chesterton's anarchists, who conceal themselves by having breakfast on a sunlit balcony in Leicester Square. ''You want a safe disguise, do you?" Sunday asks a prospective terrorist. ''You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?... Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!" If anything, Chesterton might have felt that Hamza--who lost a hand and was partially blinded on mujahideen maneuvers in Afghanistan--was too thorough in his disguise: The combination of the hook and the one white eye creates an effect almost vulgarly villainous.

There was much panting, in the wake of the London bombings, about the spirit and spunk of Londoners, their business-as-usual stalwartness, their defiance and will to ''carry on." London, says the narrator of ''Incendiary," has had ''more comebacks then 'The Evil Dead"'; faced with disaster, its people ''take a deep breath and put the kettle on." A note that we might describe as truly Chestertonian, however, was struck quietly and impeccably in a letter to the Times, published shortly after the attacks. ''Yesterday," wrote a citizen named Bryan Thwaite, ''I boarded a No. 38 bus, not as 'a small act of courage and defiance' but because I wanted to go from Piccadilly Circus to Tottenham Court Road."

James Parker is a writer living in Brookline.