FLANN O’BRIEN’S At Swim-Two-Birds is one of the ten great comic books of the century, and it is one of the five outrageous fictional experiments of all time that come completely and triumphantly off. What a fuss the French anti-novelists make about their tedious exercises in chosisme; how little fuss has been made about Flann O’Brien’s humour, humanity, metaphysics, theology, bawdry, mythopoeia, word-play and six-part counterpoint.
He died quietly last year, hardly yet recognised. It is doubtful whether this first of the posthumous books we’re promised – a surprise that’s waited 26 years to be sprung from the grave – will bring the irony of belated bestsellerdom, or even a move towards universal acknowledgement of O’Brien’s genius. It will take the novel-reading public a fair time to accept The Third Policeman.
Much of the material is comic, but the overall effect is very gruesome, even (and this is eventually confirmed as not mere fancy) infernal. The anonymous narrator, who has a wooden leg, conspires with the man named Divney to murder a rich farmer and steal his cashbox. It is left to the narrator to pick up the loot from the dead man’s house. As his fingers touch the handle of the box, the whole world suddenly changes. The dead man is alive again, the narrator’s soul (called Joe) enters the narrative as a disembodied voice, the cashbox has been magically transferred to a remote police barracks. The narrator goes to get it and becomes involved with two strange policemen: the eponymous third is reserved for very much later.
Sergeant Pluck is obsessed with his teeth and with bicycles; Policeman MacCruiskeen makes Chinese boxes, of which the innermost is microscopic; their speech is Irish solecistic sesquipedalian raised to the ultimate power. They record meticulous readings on an unknown instrument; they condemn the narrator to death and start to build his gallows, grumbling about the price of wood; they take him to an underground treasury where all wishes are granted. Kafka, we think crossed with James Stephens. And very nearly, but not quite, something of Joyce.
O’Brien had little to learn from Joyce except a few technical tricks; he was already endowed with Irish poetic pedantry which it was Joyce’s achievement to exploit to the epic limit. O’Brien is more modest. He is content here with the creation of a whole bogus scholarship centred on the writings of an impossible savant called de Selby. This mad philosopher is the narrator’s personal obsession. He is invoked on every occasion, often in dense footnotes which rise up the page and flood out the narrative. One is reminded of Finnegans Wake, but only just. The materials of that phantasmagoria are real life; everything here is made out of the world of the dead. The narrator, we eventually discover, is dead: his accomplice planted a bomb in the house of the robbed and murdered farmer and blew him up. The horrible logic of de Selby belongs to a quiet and somehow friendly hell where bicycles and an entity called an omnium are among the obsessive furniture. It is circular, and we end as we begin (‘Is it about a bicycle?’ asks Sergeant Pluck).
I will not disclose who the third policeman is. I will say no more except that this book is frightening in its originality, and that only O’Brien could have written it. To say that it is a piece of mad Irishry is not enough: it is mad Irishry used for a profound and terrible end. Sergeant Pluck says: ‘Michael Gilhaney is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principles of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’ First time round we grin condescendingly, as at a bit of fay whimsy. Second time round we know where we are.
It is consoling to know that Joyce read At Swim-Two-Birds – and thought highly of it. It’s a pity that he never saw The Third Policeman, though it was written the year before he died. I think, even with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake behind him, he might have been envious. The world of the dead was his logical next step.
Observer, 3 September 1967
Review of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
(London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967)