The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
Book Information for JimElkins
- Title
- The Third Policeman
- Author
- Flann O'Brien
- Member
- JimElkins
- Publication
- Dalkey Archive Pr (2002), Edition: Second printing, Paperback, 200 pages
- Reading Dates
- Tags
- Collections
- Your library, Irish
- Rating
- Review
- 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' show more 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. show less - Lending
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Description
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's 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 show more 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. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
Medellia Both share a certain slippery, sinister prose, and both are ontological nightmares.
20
by andomck
shelfoflisa Very surreal, dark, gothic, mind-bending humour
Member Reviews
Review from JimElkins
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 show more 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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
Other Reviews
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
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 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
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.
-Rita Mae Brown
The phrase practically screams common sense, does it not? And yet endurance, perseverance, and stubborn tenacity are all valued qualities in the face of a seemingly unobtainable goal. Personally, what immediately comes to mind are the trials and tribulations of scientists in countless laboratories scattered across the globe. Proclaiming a hypothesis, designing an experiment to match it, and then conducting it over and over and over again, enough to gain enough data points to exclude both systematic and random error, avoidable and unavoidable biasing of the results. Three is the magic number required to measure just how wrong the data show more could possibly be, but more is always encouraged, just in case a monstrous outlier rears its head due to some unforeseen amount of chaos.
And if that experiment proves faulty, scientific training demands a do-over. Correct the hypothesis a touch, adjust the variables a smidgen, re-calibrate the chemicals and fine-tune the machinery, then repeat the process countless times more. On and on and on, as one of the blessings of the scientific method is that conclusions can always be questioned, answers can always be tested ad infinitum, and theories that have lasted for millenia can have their sterling reputations cracked like an egg during the space of a single hour.
Now, what does this have to do with The Third Policeman? Well, the previous two paragraphs in essence described a major plot point, the "twist" if you will of the entire narrative, as well as an action that multiple characters take part in throughout the course of the story. More importantly, there are a surprising amount of passages that are grounded firmly in the 'insanity' that science is.
Human existence de Selby has defined as 'a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief'...From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or seriallism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even 'living'....The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain - 'as at present developed' - to appreciate the reality of these separate 'rests', preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion...
Some of you may be familiar with the concept of integration in mathematics. For those who are not, imagine a line on a graph. Make it as curved and chaotic as you please. Now, imagine finding an equation to calculate the area underneath that line for however far it shoots out into infinity, bounded only by the horizontal (x) and vertical (y) axes that the line originates from. The accepted process is to imagine an infinitely narrow slice of that area, then add up as many of the slices as necessary. Realistically speaking, this is impossible. Mathematically, this is one of the fundamental bases of calculus, and is one of if not the most useful calculation skill to have under one's belt for engineering.
The parallels between seeming insanity and hard science don't stop there.
'How big is all this place?'
'It is no size at all,' the Sergeant explained, 'because there is no difference anywhere in it and we have no conception of the extent of its unchanging coequality.'
In engineering problems involving lines, shapes, and volumes, it is a very popular method to extend one or more of the axes of the shape out to infinity, thereby reducing seeming differences to insignificant in the grand scale of things, and ridding one of the necessity of calculation for that particular part. You would not believe how much easier this makes calculation, although it is true that these infinitely long, infinitely wide, and infinitely large objects have a very major issue:
They lacked an essential property of all known objects...Simply their appearance, if even that word is not inadmissible, was not understood by the eye and was in any event indescribable.
Regardless, the calculations always work out.
Another scientific curiosity, albeit a bit more grounded in fact than the previous.
'Some people,' he said, 'call it energy but the right name is omnium because there is far more than energy in the inside of it, whatever it is. Omnium is the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything at it is always the same.'
I nodded wisely.
'It never changes. But it shows itself in a million ways and it always comes in waves. now take the case of the light on the mangle.'
'Take it,' I said.
'Light is the same omnium on a short wave but if it comes on a longer wave it is in the form of noise, or sound. With my own patents I can stretch a ray out until it becomes sound...But ominium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export.'
Light is both a particle and a wave, waves that have a much higher frequency than sound waves. Every object in the physical world has what is called a 'resonant frequency', most popularly illustrated by an opera singer breaking a glass with their voice. At that point, the frequency of the noise matches the vibrational frequency of the multitudes of atomic bonds within the structure, causing it to absorb energy and eventually break apart. Whether this process can ever be reversed and form physical objects from vibrations is a fascinating question indeed.
And finally, the amazing properties of water.
[de Selby] praises the equilbrium of water, its circumambiencey, equiponderance and equitableness, and declares that water, 'if not abused' can achieve 'absolute superiority'...In Bassett's view the water was treated in the patent water-box and diluted to a degree that made it invisible - in the guise of water, at all events - to the untutored watchers at the sewer.
If you ever find yourself working with bioengineers, you'll run across drug delivery problems. Not only do they involve integration and shapes that break the laws of reality, they involve liquids of all densities, viscosities, and diffusion constants. Unless you're dealing with water or something that has been 'infinitely diluted' in water, essentially easing calculations by being deemed 'perfect' in its insignificant interactions. In other words, you can ignore it. The only problem with de Selby's approach is attempting to demonstrate these mathematical tricks in real life, resulting in a household usage of 9,000 gallons of water in one day, none of which was observed to ever leave the house. Again, realistically incomprehensible. But scientifically sound.
I could go on about the myriad reality-defying ways the book illustrates that in actuality are necessary for successful scientific reasoning. But I think that you have all had enough lessons in mathematics/physics/general engineering for one day. Rest assured, this is not all that the book has going for it. There are many passages of dry wit that had me flat out giggling, as well as wonderfully unconventional metaphors that raised the reality the words described to a unusual, yet beautiful art. You'll even find scathing critiques of society and profound existential meanderings within these pages.
However, what stuck with me the most were the uncanny similarities between the strange logic that the book operated on and the science of the real world. Not all of the book's weirdness is reflected in sound science, but science itself has its own cases of crackpot theories and misinformed conclusions. Ultimately, to discover the truth, scientists delve into these realms, these hells if you will, of supreme weirdness and nonsensical assumptions, bring back bits and pieces for the rest of humanity to benefit from, and then dive back for more. It's a wonder that more of them don't go mad from the effort. 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, isdisappointed 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
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
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
Near the outset of Flann O’Brien’s wild The Third Policeman, the unnamed first-person narrator and his business partner Divney settle on a plot to murder Mathers and steal his fortune, purportedly kept in a steel cashbox. In short order the deed is done (by our narrator), after which the narrative takes a turn, plunging us into the confusing, the confoundingly funny, and the downright weird. Fortunately, O’Brien plays with our minds and our language is a most diverting way, and I found myself laughing while I worried for our hero, almost certain to die.
I can do no better than quote a few passages, to give you the flavor of the book: on an outing with a police Sergeant, the narrator and a man named Gilhaney search for Gilhaney’s show more stolen bicycle (Chap. 6):
“We were now going through a country full of fine enduring trees where it was always five o’clock in the afternoon. It was a soft corner of the world, free from inquisitions and disputations and very soothing and sleepening on the mind. There was no animal there that was bigger than a man’s thumb and no noise superior to that which the Sergeant was making with his nose, an unusual brand of music like wind in the chimney. ”
Chapter 6 again:
“Before we had time to listen carefully to what he was after saying he was half-way down the road with his forked coat sailing behind him on the sustenance of the wind he was raising by reason of his headlong acceleration.
‘A droll man,’ I ventured.
‘A constituent man,’ said the Sergeant, ‘largely instrumental but volubly fervous.”
Such are the locutions of our characters, but I have not spent any words on the outré buildings, oddball, unexplained plot events, and existential threat which our narrator in turn faces. I have also not mentioned the cockeyed life, work, and honored reputation of the writer, experimentalist, and philosopher de Selby, about whose work our narrator is something of a scholar. Discussions, asides and lengthy footnotes leaven the early chapters, and make their highly comic appearance throughout. I have no idea what the author means with this addition, except to double our fun.
This novel will amuse and bemuse you, and you will wonder a few times, what is the point? There is definitely a point, dear readers, and well worth sticking around through the 19th-century horror passages for. This novel is a classic of its type: dark, atmospheric, and laugh-out-loud funny.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-third-policeman-by-flann-obrien.... show less
I can do no better than quote a few passages, to give you the flavor of the book: on an outing with a police Sergeant, the narrator and a man named Gilhaney search for Gilhaney’s show more stolen bicycle (Chap. 6):
“We were now going through a country full of fine enduring trees where it was always five o’clock in the afternoon. It was a soft corner of the world, free from inquisitions and disputations and very soothing and sleepening on the mind. There was no animal there that was bigger than a man’s thumb and no noise superior to that which the Sergeant was making with his nose, an unusual brand of music like wind in the chimney. ”
Chapter 6 again:
“Before we had time to listen carefully to what he was after saying he was half-way down the road with his forked coat sailing behind him on the sustenance of the wind he was raising by reason of his headlong acceleration.
‘A droll man,’ I ventured.
‘A constituent man,’ said the Sergeant, ‘largely instrumental but volubly fervous.”
Such are the locutions of our characters, but I have not spent any words on the outré buildings, oddball, unexplained plot events, and existential threat which our narrator in turn faces. I have also not mentioned the cockeyed life, work, and honored reputation of the writer, experimentalist, and philosopher de Selby, about whose work our narrator is something of a scholar. Discussions, asides and lengthy footnotes leaven the early chapters, and make their highly comic appearance throughout. I have no idea what the author means with this addition, except to double our fun.
This novel will amuse and bemuse you, and you will wonder a few times, what is the point? There is definitely a point, dear readers, and well worth sticking around through the 19th-century horror passages for. This novel is a classic of its type: dark, atmospheric, and laugh-out-loud funny.
https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-third-policeman-by-flann-obrien.... show less
4 and a half stars. one of my favourite writers, and every once in a while it's time to reread this one. it's a very funny spoof of science, logic, academic writing, and metaphysics, chaotic but organized, elegant and playful. everyone should own it. though i warn you, it's gonna lead to reading a lot more of Brian O'Nolan's body of work in every pseudonym and style - even his hilarious and very pointed journalistic columns for the Irish Times read just the same. but also, this classic jumps every genre line (surrealistic sf? existential mystery? Lewis Carrollist discourse delivered in absurdist mode? an allegory about heaven and hell? okay, all of the above, and more, in the loose and unassuming structure of an Irish tall tale). but show more this read, i marvelled at how the narrative seamlessly describes quantum space, utilizing string theory, as it demonstrates the folding up of dimensions and peers at the possible contents of a Schrodinger's box - even though the book was written in 1940, and appears weightless in content and style, while it reads like a fever dream. show less
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Author Information
48+ Works 12,559 Members
Writer Brian O'Nolan was born on October 5, 1911. He graduated from University College, Dublin. This gifted Irish writer had three identities: Brian O'Nolan, an Irish civil servant and administrator; Myles Copaleen, columnist for the Irish Times, poet and author of An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life, 1941), a satire in show more Gaelic on the Gaelic revival; and Flann O'Brien, playwright and avant-garde comic novelist. His masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), went almost unrecognized in its time. This novel, which plays havoc with the conventional novel form, is about a man writing a book about characters in turn writing about him. O'Brien starts off with three separate openings. The Third Policeman (1967), funny but grim, plunges into the world of the dead, though one is not immediately aware that the protagonist is no longer living. He died on April 1, 1966. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Third Policeman
- Original title
- The Third Policeman
- Original publication date
- 1967
- People/Characters
- John Divney; Phillip Mathers; Martin Finnucane; Sergeant Pluck; Policeman MacCruiskeen; Michael Gilhaney
- Important places
- Ireland
- 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 ... (show all)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 - 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 g... (show all)reat 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.)"Is it about a bicycle?" he asked.
- Blurbers
- Brown, George Mackay; Wright, Craig
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 823.912
- Canonical LCC
- PR6029.N56
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- 19 — Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh, Portuguese (Brazil)
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- ISBNs
- 60
- ASINs
- 34