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The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
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The Third Policeman (original 1967; edition 1976)

by Flann O'Brien

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4,2271222,768 (4.01)265
"The Third Policeman" is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, "The Third Policeman" joins O'Brien's other fiction ("At Swim-Two-Birds," "The Poor Mouth," "The Hard Life," "The Best of Myles," and "The Dalkey Archive") to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.… (more)
Member:joshuamneff
Title:The Third Policeman
Authors:Flann O'Brien
Info:Plume (1976), Edition: Reissue, Paperback
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:ireland, fantasy, weird fiction

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The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (1967)

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» See also 265 mentions

English (116)  Spanish (2)  Danish (1)  German (1)  Swedish (1)  Greek (1)  All languages (122)
Showing 1-5 of 116 (next | show all)
Another of the books I read twenty or more years ago. I read a lot of Flann O'Brien then and particularly enjoyed the collections of his journalism, but hadn't looked at any of his work since. I can say that I liked The Third Policeman just as much as the first time I read it, but with more years behind me see completely different things in it. Then it was a comic, absurd fantasy; now it reads as a much darker, surreal piece. The comedy is still there - the way bicycles and their riders start becoming more alike over the years - but it underpins what is essentially a vision of some sort of hell. There is a certain ornateness to the language which adds to the darkly comic feel, and it's certainly a book worth reading more than once. ( )
  petermt | Dec 18, 2023 |
Avrei potuto appartenere a una solitaria spiaggia, o essere l'agonia del mare quando si abbatte disperato su di essa.
(198)

Come dire: esiste sempre un altro punto di vista (da percorrere su pista ciclabile).

Mai, finora, avevo creduto o sospettato di avere un'anima, ma in quel momento seppi d'averla. ... Per comodita', decisi di chiamarla Joe. (32)

"Perche' si dovrebbe rubare un orologio quando si puo' rubare una bicicletta?".
...
"Che ne so'?" dissi.
"Chi ha mai sentito di uno che monta in sella a un orologio o che si porta a casa un sacco di torba sul manubrio di un cronometro?".
(76)

"Non credo che andro' mai in bicicletta" dissi.
"A piccole dosi fa bene, irrobisticce e mette in corpo un po' di ferro. E poi andare a piedi troppo lontano, troppo spesso e troppo in fretta non e' affatto raccomandabile. Il continuo scrocchiare dei piedi per terra immette nel corpo una certa quantita' di strada. Quando un uomo muore, si dice che ritorna alla terra, ma camminare molto riempie di terra assai prima (o seppellisce lungo la strada particelle del corpo) e avvicina l'incontro con la morte. ...

(111)
( )
  NewLibrary78 | Jul 22, 2023 |
Some really funny and delightfully odd bits, but the awkward and yakky midsection did not gel for me. ( )
  grahzny | Jul 17, 2023 |
This book is apparently quite well-known, but it was new to me - I was led to it by Brian Catling's list of favorite books in The Week of June 4th. Few things are better than finding a book as entertaining and peculiar as this one out of the blue. Although this surreal novel is overall quite disturbing, it is frequently as funny as anything I've read in a long while. When it was originally rejected, the reviewer at Longman's wrote, We realize the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so. I find even this bit of associated history delightful. O'Nolan (O'Brien is a pen name) eventually claimed that the manuscript was lost, but it sat in open view on his sideboard for 26 years. It was, either ironically or appropriately, published a year after his death. That this book should lie in obscurity while Sartre's No Exit is so famous, confirms the greatness of the former by De Selby's second law.
Looking over my notes I see many great new words for me including, hereditament, oxters, and stoons. My one and only complaint is that the author did not recognize that, when executed, people are hanged not hung (this might be the work of a posthumous editor). ( )
  markm2315 | Jul 1, 2023 |
I was recommended this book many years ago and it has probably taken me forty-five years to get around to reading it. In one way, that is a loss; in another, it is perhaps fortunate, because as a younger reader I might not have appreciated all the connections that a perusal of this text throw up. On one hand, it is a surreal masterpiece; on the other, a dark fable; on yet another, an exploration of the loquaciousness of the Irish mind. I do not yet know if O'Brien was recording the colloquial speech of Dublin in the 1930s, or if some of the terminology in the book was his own coinage, which professional Irish creative personalities have over time picked up and shared with us. Suffice it to say, I kept coming across words and phrases I recognised.

The language is certainly highly redolent and I found myself at times reading some of it out loud for the sheer joy of it.

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was that whilst reading the book, I had a BBC radio news/current affairs programme on; and I became aware that the items I heard - an interview with a professor of political economy and migration statistics from the London School of Economics, followed by a piece on trying to get an AI to write topical jokes - seemed to acquire some of the oblique propensities of O'Brien's prose. Either the world was suddenly revealed to me in its true surreal nature, or the book itself was warping reality. Perhaps de Selby could enlighten me.... ( )
2 vote RobertDay | May 16, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 116 (next | show all)

» Add other authors (9 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
O'Brien, Flannprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Bantock, NickCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Donoghue, DenisAfterword, Introductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Drews, KristiinaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Hedlund, MagnusTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Norton, JimNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Rowohlt, HarryTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
"Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death."
~ de Selby
"Since the affairs of men rest still uncertain,/ Let's reason with the worst that may befall."
~ Shakespeare
Dedication
First words
Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
Quotations
The silence in the room was so unusually quiet that the beginning of it seemed rather loud when the utter stillness of the end of it had been encountered.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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"The Third Policeman" is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, "The Third Policeman" joins O'Brien's other fiction ("At Swim-Two-Birds," "The Poor Mouth," "The Hard Life," "The Best of Myles," and "The Dalkey Archive") to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.

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a book once read -- upside down | stories get -- dead forgotten

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