The Third Policeman

Silly, surreal and sinister, it's long since past time that I got around to reading it. I was always a big fan of At Swim Two Birds and The Best Of Myles, so it's a mystery why it took me this long. Anyway, a work of genius, published after its' author's death and every bit as influential on modern literature and culture as, say, contemporaries and admirers Joyce and Beckett. The story of a murderer who finds himself confronted with his victim, apparently alive, and who visits a police station and the people and the things he discovers there, by turns inane and extraordinary, amazingly sublime and deeply creepy. Extremely funny, with satirical interpretations of physics and logic and philosophy as well as the celebrated footnotes show more concerning the celebrated De Selby, but ultimately rather chilling and nightmarish, it ranks as one of the great works of 20th Century literature, let alone perhaps the greatest work of 20th Century fantasy.

This edition comes with some additional material, including a potted biography of Brian Nolan and some pieces on the text itself. Appropriately enough, the short piece on De Selby reads almost exactly like a De Selbian footnote.

*Reread this for a panel at WorldCon, er, tomorrow, as it happens, and the prospect of attending a convention every day for five days does have sinister hellish-going-round overtones, thank you very much for suggesting that thought, brain, taken by surprise once again by just how damn weird it is while at the same time being thoroughly prosaic. Became slightly fixated on the idea that there were footnotes to the footnotes that were too small to be observed by the human eye, and those footnotes had more footnotes all the way down to the subatomic infinity. Also, since I have just read Cronin's biography giving social context to the book, still wondering abut the book's appearance on the TV show and how a book written on a island with a small population concentrated on a coastal spot with an inland full of incomprehensible strangers, opressive, paraniod, haunted by holy secrets, and that eeveryone with any sense is trying to get away from could possibly be relevant to Lost. show less

"... the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest."[return][return]I don't know why it's taken me so long to read Flann O'Brien. Perhaps his work has been a Schrödinger's Book, for me: as long as his books were unread, in their sealed box, they could be both the Greatest Surreal Irish Humor Ever Written and an incredibly lame disappointment. I could go along, complacently, in both states simultaneously. [return][return]BUT ... realities must be faced. The cat is scratching furiously at the inside of the box, and meowing plaintively ( ... The book is ... scratching furiously ... Sorry, the analogy kind of got away from me there ...), show more and my first Flann O'Brien has been read, and I am delighted to say that it is a TREAT. [return][return]OK, yes, it's like a Monty Python sketch, on acid, and inflated to the length of a 200 page book. And yes, O'Brien sometimes was inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. (The four page footnotes, in 8pt font should be a bit of a giveaway ...) but it is very, very funny.[return][return]So many, many excellent excellent reviews here, entering fully into the spirit of the thing, that I don't feel that I have much that I can add. Some very enlightening reviews, too. (Learning that Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien was so disappointed by the reaction to his novel, when he hawked the manuscript around in the late 30s/early 40s, that he claimed to have lost it, and it was only rediscovered and published after his death, is so meta I want to die of happiness.) [return][return]I just hope that, somewhere, he knows that what he's written was just the pancake.[return][return]One thought that I'd like to share: the fingerprints of The Third Policeman are on every example of Irish humor that I can think of. Father Ted? (With priests instead of policemen ... ) Derry Girls? (Girls swapped for boys. And James is a bicycle ...) Any of the works of Martin McDonagh, including the glorious In Bruges? Having read The Third Policeman, a LOT of things in that movie suddenly made a lot more sense to me ... [return][return]"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed," I murmured, "to those who seek the higher places." show less

I am puzzled by the jacket copy on the John F. Byrne Irish Literature Series edition of The Third Policeman, which calls it a "brilliant comic novel." Surely, this story is dark as dark can be, and portrays a tragedy with exacting, clinical detail. The tale is in fact profoundly absurd, and checkered with the narrator's preoccupation with a perverse body of scholarship surrounding a narcoleptic alchemist. But that's bicycling for you.

To experience the full effect of this novel, I recommend avoiding advance glosses of the plot, although the plot is really only a fraction of the value of reading it, but this plot is reeled out in an unusual and impressive manner. Moreover, such glosses tend to have inaccuracies, like the jacket copy's show more misconception that the "narrator ... is introduced to ... de Selby's view that the earth is not round but 'sausage-shaped'" while at the police station, when in fact he has clearly done his exhaustive study of de Selby long before.

The 1999 introduction by Denis Donoghue insists on quoting a piece of a letter from author Flann O'Brien to William Saroyan, in which the ending of the book is perfectly spoiled. This same letter excerpt also appears at the end of the book, having been appended by the editors at the original (posthumous) 1967 publication, apparently in the belief that readers might need this assistance after failing to comprehend what they had read, despite it being as plainly put as possible. Donoghue's introduction is otherwise worth reading (after the novel), with its brief biography of O'Brien (pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan) and a debatable attempt to classify the book as Menippean satire.

But the real attraction of this book is the wonderful language, which alternates among three modes. There are artful descriptions of imponderables. "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" (105). There are careful reviews of academic argumentation. "His conclusion was that 'hammering is anything but what it appears to be'; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening" (144-5 n). And there are personal encounters featuring ambivalent dialogues in spare and careful language. "And as I went upon my way I was slightly glad that I had met him" (49).

The book is organized into twelve chapters. If these reflect an esoteric infrastructure such as astrological houses, I haven't persuaded myself so. The pace of the prose is fast, even if the pace of events described is sometimes so slow as to be entirely immobile. The Third Policeman had been on my virtual TBR pile for many years, and my actual one for some months, when I finally read it in a matter of a few days. Alas, I may read it again! show less

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 show more 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.... show less

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 show more 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. show less

The initially peculiar writing style, which put me in mind of Magnus Mills, grew on me to become a flashback of listening in as a child to Irish adult conversations not quite understanding but feeling strangely comforted in alienation. By the time a character used the word gawm to describe himself O'Brien had already drawn me deep into the colloquialism. This is an exaggerated world of a band of wooden legged men and half man half bicycle policemen, and yet there is a straightforward robbery and murder plot underpinning the strangeness. The story has moments of horror, comedy, and tenderness, and segments which exercise the mind with intriguing possibilities of what lies beyond our wordly perceptions of normality. The plot leaves plenty show more of scope to wander and wonder ahead the various twists and turns. The dreamlike quality of the narrative reflects a stream of unconciousness which becomes clear in a beautifully crafted finale. The book contains numerous footnotes which are undoubtedly clever in their seemingly important referencing of the works and experiences of a fictitious physician and intellectual, though at times these become a tediously distracting sideshow whilst allowing the author to run a parallel story written with a completely different style of prose.
The Third Policeman is throughly entertaining work best read in your favoured rural Irish dialect. show less

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is a novel ahead of its time, more like the novels of the sixties it was posthumously published in than those of the 1930s, the decade it was written in. From its opening confession of murder, causally and casually attributed to the influence of a "lazy and idle-minded" companion, the novel's unnamed protagonist relates his misadventures in a detached, first-person voice which makes him seem more an observer of–rather than a participant in–his own life.

Augmenting the saga of his efforts to avoid being hung for the aforementioned murder with a series of footnotes that would make David Foster Wallace proud, the narrator alternates between intellectual discussions of the obscure philosopher de Selby show more and the absurd doings of the local police force. The force consists of the pragmatic Sergeant Pluck, whose primary concern is the whereabouts and welfare of local bicycles, the mechanically gifted Policeman MacCruiskeen, whose fantastic inventions are not only beyond human understanding but often intentionally hazardous to their wellbeing, and the elusive Policeman Fox, who spends his nights away from the station invisibly and efficiently solving crimes. While trying to escape his fate at the hands the local constabulary, the protagonist spends time in eternity, is disappointed when the rescue mission of his wooden legged patron saint is thwarted by MacCruiskeen's dementia-inducing pigment, and finds himself inside the walls of his victim's house before finally discovering he has been dead for most of the novel, wandering through hell in punishment of his crime.

The footnotes tell a tale of their own, the strange competition between de Selby's commentators as they argue over the interpretation of his contradictory philosophy, such as his beliefs that night is caused by "accretions of black air" and that man should have no fear of the hallucination of death, since both life and day and night are mere hallucinations themselves.

The Third Policeman is peopled with memorable characters in logically absurd situations that will keep you thoroughly entertained. show less