FLANN O’BRIEN IS TWENTY-EIGHT in 1939, the year his debut novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds, appears. Dylan Thomas is kind to the book in an English newspaper, but otherwise the Luftwaffe and the fall of Paris preoccupy critics and readers alike. Undaunted, O’Brien drafts a second novel in a matter of months and sends it to his London publisher. They pass on the manuscript. The war deepens and neutral Ireland is no one’s good friend. Flann O’Brien, pseudonym for Brian O’Nolan, considered the most auspicious literary talent to have emerged from University College, Dublin, since James Joyce, keeps his job as a civil servant. He throws his energies into a newspaper column. He drinks in the company of men who wear white gloves to bars, on account of promises to wives to never touch alcohol.
And the second novel? Lost, O’Brien claims. Over the years, the tale grows more boozy; he is driving at high speed when the manuscript up and flies out the car window, pages strewn across the Irish countryside.
In the late 1950s young editors, stirred by the unbuttoned brilliance of At-Swim-Two-Birds, launch a Flann O’Brien revival. Though by then bitter and besotted, he obliges with two more books. Both are funny and show flashes of greatness, but are also cursory, half-realized. O’Brien dies in 1966, a disappointment.
The lost manuscript is found. It is called The Third Policeman, and its presence in the author’s desk for a quarter-century might well have driven him to drink. The novel is less dazzling than its predecessor but that much more serious and mature: the first draft of a major work. As the years passed and O’Brien further squandered his talents—in a desperate act of secret self-plagiarism, he borrowed bits of it for use in his final novel, The Dalkey Archive—the book must have become his own variation on Dorian Gray: a reminder of the writer he once was, or might have been.
Though the “story” behind a novel is never reason enough to read it, The Third Policeman benefits from this introduction. Appearing posthumously, and lacking the knee-slapping zaniness of At-Swim-Two-Birds, the book has flitted in and out of consideration as part of the Irish canon. It has also been read out of order, so to speak. Many O’Brien fans actually prefer the “lite” work, and cannot fathom the oddness and moral acuity of this manuscript. They think it an aberration, an off-moment.
I believe it is a novel charged with the same weird energy as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Both deal with the aftermath of a bomb. In Pynchon, the consequence is social derangement; all changed utterly by humanity having bitten into the apple of mass self-destruction. In The Third Policeman, the consequence is a narrator transported from his own familiar but deeply strange world into a parallel one that is strange but deeply familiar. O’Brien invests slapstick and lowbrow comedy—a blow-hard cop, gags with bicycles and dogs—with overtones of menace. Tall tales turn swiftly dark; the “crack,” as the Irish call good banter, starts to crack up. Where we are is Ireland, the book infers—pace Marlowe’s Faustus on hell—and must ever be.
The Third Policeman is about how our subconscious propels us where our conscious selves wisely refuse to go. It is definitely a parable. It definitely heads down a narrow and dark thematic road. But the novel is also a first draft by an author who shows signs of being disconcerted, perhaps even scared, by what he is creating. (The use of footnotes, supposedly to mock academic pomposity, is a clear hedge.) When I read the book as a graduate student in Dublin I thought it an amazing piece of writing. Few agreed with me. When I did my thesis on the novel, I kept finding more and more there: layers and fears, dares and cop-outs. I couldn’t believe so few scholars took the work seriously. In the end, I doubt I convinced many to reconsider.
So the issue of the quality of The Third Policeman is far from settled. That doesn’t alter the harrowing story of how the novel came into being. Works-in-progress are always precarious. At any moment, the thing can break down. At any moment, you may decide that a month or a year or ten years of effort were for naught. But suppose you finish a book, one that more or less fell out of you, and find it so singular you can’t tell if it is brilliant or embarrassing. Suppose you opt to shelve it; suppose you never write anything at that pitch again. Eventually, the abandoned manuscript must start to look strange indeed, ruthless and fanatical, especially compared to your more relaxed, current work. Eventually, you think yourself prudent to have “lost” it. Not a coward at all; an artist much the wiser—and happier?—for knowing his limits and his taste.