Everyone has a theory about this novel. There are at least five commonly cited explanations:

1. Flann O'Brien is the forgotten postmodernist, the one who didn't leave Ireland. The 'Third Policeman' is one of the last books Joyce read, and by implication the 'Third Policeman' is a kind of Doppelgaenger to 'Finnegans Wake.' Its play with language and its reflexivity about the novel form is somehow parallel to Joyce's.

2. Flann O'Brien was an alcoholic, and this is the product of so many unhappy binges and half-remembered delusions. The book is an indirect but eloquent record of that generation in Ireland, when the humor was desperate, when the church was all-powerful, when what's now called 'homosocial' life in crowded dingy pubs had to stand in for wider society.

3. Flann O'Brien is a member of what Hugh Kenner called 'Irish nihilism.' There is no moral sense in the book, which after all begins with someone's head being crushed by a garden spade. This also supposedly explains the absence of contrition or any religious feeling. Denis Donoghue almost assents to this in his strange and covertly republican Afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition.

4. Flann O'Brien is a minimalist, with deep ties to Beckett. This is one of the lines in Fintan O'Toole's 2009 review in the 'New York Review of Books.'

5. Flann O'Brien's own explanation is that the book is about a dead man, and that the last page shows how the damned suffer their punishments eternally. But that's only an explanation if your idea of hell already includes knives so thin they can't be seen, microscopic carved wooden boxes, and sexually mutable bicycles. Otherwise it doesn't 'explain' anything.

The fact that these are all forced or unhelpful should probably indicate that the book is stranger than its commentators think. But the fact that people keep coming up with these one-line explanations shows how the novel keeps prodding its readers: it is just too strange to be accepted as a mid-century modernist novel, and for many readers a theory, no matter how artificial, helps soothe the discomfort. But what is the avant-garde, if it isn't a thing that is not anticipated? That can't be accommodated? That wasn't asked for, that solves no problem we ever thought we had?

One thing I especially love about the 'Third Policeman' is the sense of Irish landscape that it conjures, in between its many fantasies and concoctions. If you take away the hallucinated afterlife that occupies most of the book, what remains? A very poor, simple countryside, with farms and a few police stations and pubs, and miles of bumpy roads, sodden fields, muck, brambles, dripping copses, and gorse. There is almost nothing else: people ride bicycles everywhere. When they think they might become rich, they dream of changes of clothes. There is almost no mention of what they eat or drink. It is an impoverished landscape -- and in relation to it, O'Brien's perverse and perfervid inventions are even more desperate, more necessary, and more painful. ( )

To explain what this book is about would be to spoil it - it only makes sense once the reader reaches the end and things become clearer, which isn't to say clear. The book is funny, idiosyncratically, funny as in amusing, funny as in confusing, and funny also as in weird. Superficially, it is also clever, but the bits I thought were clever at first did not completely add up upon consideration; his would be recherché references are all made up, some obviously so. What this book does have to recommend it though, aside from the peculiar brand of humour, is the confusion afforded to the reader. Confusion is not normally a good thing, but here it plays a vital part of the story, as the character is in a state of confusion for a good proportion of the book, which the reader must partake in also to be able to appreciate what, against the odds, turns out to be a surprisingly well cobbled together piece of fiction. ( )

This book operates on its own internal logic and is really hard to summarize as a result. In the beginning, the unnamed narrator - an orphan obsessed with the works of the (fictional) philosopher de Selby - is living with a man named Jack Divney who comes up with the idea of killing Old Mathers to fund the narrator's publishing of his critical work on said de Selby. They do so, and eventually Divney sends the narrator to Old Mathers' place to get the black box with money. In this cabin, he meets with Old Mathers, apparently alive again. From there, the oddities begin to pile up.

Definitely the only book I've ever read that was made less comprehensible by looking up words I was unfamiliar with, _The Third Policeman_ is pretty bizarre and way outside of my reading comfort zone. I read it because of the references to it on the TV show "Lost," which is why I persevered to the end instead of stopping at page 30. That being said, I'm glad I pressed on because once I got to the end I completely reinterpreted the events of the story, and I thought what the author accomplishes with the story is interesting. Still, it's the sort of book you have to really think about and almost works better for a discussion or classroom than for pleasure reading. ( )

The Third Policeman is a shining example of how powerful an absurdist, surreal plot can be. This novel concerns a murderous man and his accomplice, and the dream-like ways that he is subsequently pursued by three policemen. There are passages that are really hilarious, and others that are downright disturbing. The writing is a pleasure to read, with the language bordering on the poetic in places. But essentially this is a book about ideas - dizzying, disjointed ideas admittedly, but no less fascinating and gripping for that. I went through the novel assuming that the ideas made the novel a little stilted and even, on occasion, trivial - until I reached the end. I don't want to give it away, but the end of the novel completely transforms how you perceive the rest of the novel. It made me want to reread the whole thing, as it does show the novel is far deeper and richer than it at first appears. ( )

Flann O'Brien, hero ( )