The Third Policeman

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 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 show more 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 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....

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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 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.

Bizarrely good. An aura of strangeness tinged the first few pages, and then it intensified, and then there was a surreal tumble down the rabbit hole into a very curious world. A place where "...the trees were active where they stood." You need to "use your internal imagination".
Descriptions and events and expounded philosophies sort of made a weak and tenuous sense. The edge of sense. Until you realise it was making no sense at all and you were lost again. But then another promising thread of logic is offered and eagerly grasped. It only takes you deeper.

Some of the incidental descriptions of the land, the surroundings, were beautiful. "The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens. Birds were stirring and the great kingly trees were being pleasingly interfered with by the first breezes."
"The road...ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way."
Time and space are interchangeable. "... he led the way heavily into the middle of the morning." This is not logical, yet it makes sense.
Inanimate things don't become animated but they do assume a different essence, all explainable by the Atomic Theory. Which again made a weird sort of illogical sense.
"...you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is"

A delightful, bendy-mind kind of book that will take your brain out for a run, and then won't return it to the same show more spot. show less

A surreal experience, this: as if Spike Milligan and Franz Kafka drafted an Alice in Wonderland for grownups, then handed it off to PKD and M Night Shyamalan for rewrites. The absurdist Irish whimsy humour and running gag about bicycles will either tickle you or they won't. There are a couple of genuinely creepy scenes (one near the start and one near the end), and a twist that will perhaps only partially satisfy a rationalist's desire to have the preceding events explained...

In and out, in and out the window. Flann O'Brien weaves his surreal reality complete with bogus footnotes concerning the lunatic ramblings of a bird brained ontologist, people who turn into bicycles through prolonged contact, and bicycles who turn into people, a general obsession with bicycles, 2D police stations, a legion of one-legged vigilantes, miniature boxes whose contents drive one to madness, a murderer who may or may not meet the man he has murdered. Thoroughly insane, deeply darkly hilarious, this book is a must for readers who like their drollery tinged with nightmare, or conversely, like their nightmares tinged with drollery. If you think Poe and Dostoevsky are overlooked as humorist, you will probably think O'Brien is a scream. Though he is often compared to his compatriot and contemporary, Joyce, I see little likeness except for a taste for the random and absurd.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/492657.html

This is such an enjoyable work of genius. I don't think I'd picked it up for ten years, but at one point in my life I was able to quote wholesale from the atomic theory, which seemed to me hilarious when I was seventeen, and then the follow-on, that you gradually turn into a bicycle if you ride over poorly kept roads for too long, turned out to have wider application the first time I looked into a mirror and was reminded of looking at my girlfriend's face.

But I'm realising that there is more to it than that. Most of the chapters begin with reflections on the works of de Selby and his commentators - the footnote at the start of the penultimate chapter rambles on across the bottom half of six pages, starting from de Selby's inability to tell women from men and ending with the disappearance of Hatchjaw (including the troubling speculation that Hatchjaw was not Hatchjaw at all, but someone else of the same name). O'Nolan/O'Brien was of course a partial fugitive from the lore of ancient Irish literature, which may be where he drew some of his material on de Selby. He also famously took the piss out of Erwin Schrödinger, complaining that de Valera's Institute for Advanced Studies had doscovered two St Patricks and no God.

But I felt particularly on this reading that the shadow of Joyce, and of Joycean scholarship, looms over The Third Policeman; I know it was published long after, but the commentators' hunt for meaning in de Selby reminds show more me a lot of Declan Kiberd's annotations completely missing the point in a recent edition of Ulysses. I won't go on about this at length, as I've discovered as a result of further googling that (perhaps unsurprisingly) I'm not the first person to have this thought.

One other small point that clicked with me more on this reading than before was the paint of no known colour, which Policeman MacCruiskeen puts on his bicycle to defeat the one-legged men who will be driven insane when they see it. Surely, surely, this must have been inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's "The Color Out Of Space"? And it must also be an ancestor of the "Blit" stories by David Langford, collected I see in Different Kinds of Darkness. But in The Third Policeman it is only one surreal idea among many.

Some day I'll write something deep and meaningful about the descriptions of landscape in this book; or the use of mathematical concepts of topology; or the possible links with the Dunsink Observatory. show less

The Third Policeman

About twenty pages into this slim exercise of insanity, I considered tossing the book in the corner and allowing it to decay naturally beneath the hot breath of many afternoon suns. Those pages were an utter vacuum—its world and its characters were inert, lifeless and sucking the air out of room I was sitting in. Then something happened and in the words of Nat King Cole: the ceiling fell in and the bottom fell out, I went into a spin and I started to shout. Almost literally, and for reasons that become more obvious later in the book, the novel comes to a stop and seems to start again but this time ironically with a pulse and a direction. So be patient. The main character, who has forgotten his own name, is suddenly forced to look at the world as if for the first time and struggle to identify what he is seeing. Much of the novel is about how we see the world. How what we create in art and science are merely steps in a staircase to gain a better look at the world around us--but we must be careful what stairs we climb. Virtually everything we consider real is really an artificial concept. Just as words are not the thing itself, I cannot eat the word “apple”, so science is not really the world we live in nor is philosophy really the reason we are here. (Did I really even read this book?) THE THIRD POLICEMAN plays with these ideas by creating a world where virtually everything is redefined for the main character—including his own identity. Is he show more defined by his suddenly chatty soul or by how the police see him (which seems to change every page) or by his relationship with a bicycle—more complicated than you can imagine? As ALICE IN WONDERLAND created a fantastic world alternating between menace and amusement from the twisted wreckage of childhood, so THE THIRD POLICEMAN created an equally crazy and amazing world from the wreckage of science and perception. The language is playful and some passages so drop dead perfect they beg rereading. The characters are all madly bent as if viewed through a prism and you never know where the story will take you from one moment to the next. Reading this I was amazed that it was written when it was. It felt a minimum 25 years ahead of its time and it seems impossible that Douglass Adams did not read this before creating his marvelous HITCHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series. Not lightly do I add this to my list of favorite books, I was both surprised and amazed.

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"... 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."

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.

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 ...), and my first Flann O'Brien has been read, and I am delighted to say that it is a TREAT.

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.

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 show more after his death, is so meta I want to die of happiness.)

I just hope that, somewhere, he knows that what he's written was just the pancake.

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 ...

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed," I murmured, "to those who seek the higher places." show less

Wallace Steven's wrote in the opening of his "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
This inconceivable idea of the sun

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Flann O' Brien seems to have succeeded in becoming ignorant of most of what makes the world work (and make sense) before assuming the role of narrator and protagonist in this absorbing, fantastical ride through a rural Ireland that (I fear?/hope?) doesn't exist.

After being led into participating in a murder/robbery (no spoiler here - it's in the opening line of the book), our narrator finds that he has slipped into a world just beyond the one he's spent his life within, and this world is running on some other set of rules and a logic that seems both bizarre and convincing. Throughout his perigrinations through this alternate world, our protagonist seems to find something akin to hope and normalcy whenever he is outdoors or where he can observe and appreciate nature, but seems to slip into confusion and depression when indoors. Is the author commenting on nature vs the man-made (or man-imagined) world, or is it simply easier to give the character a break from the strain of this odd world by letting him walk in the sunshine once in awhile. Our protagonist seems to have slipped down the rabbit hole and, as is always the case in such alternate worlds, everyone except our show more rather poor choice of hero seems to find this world perfectly normal. I say poor choice simply because he's not very heroic, and not that easy to like at first. On the other hand, he's the perfect protagonist/narrator, in that he shares his view of this strange world he's dropped into with marvelous flair. There is a continuous sense of being lost when reading this story, but never so lost that you can't imagine finding a familiar path just around the next corner.

Accompanying the narrative is a running commetary (with footnotes) of the philosophical, metaphysical, and pseudo-scientific writings and life of a (luckily) fictional Professor.de Selby, along with his many critics and commentators. One could see how the world our narrator finds himself in could be, in some ways, the world that de Selby posits as the real word in his writings. But it's curious that the narrator has such a high regard for de Selby, while noting in each citation just one more of de Selby's theories that don't hold water. The narrator seems to be convinced that de Selby must be brilliant partly because de Selby is difficult to comprehend, and partly because his ideas don't seem to align with reality. de Selby seems to be the classic 18th-19th century English eccentric and the narrator takes him to be worthy of note primarily due to his social status.

I'm uncertain about the way the running commentary on de Selby fits in. It seems to suit the tone and point of view of the novel, but it's significance, beyond the observations made above, escapes me. However, the main story itself is a blast to read; the characters are just bizarre enough to provide many chuckles; the workings of this strange world are fascinating to contemplate; and our hero's situation and attempt to extricate himself from it succeeds in gaining our support (not bad for a murderer and robber).

This classic work would suit many sci-fi fans, or anyone else who enjoys slipping into a parallel reality once in awhile. A recommended read.

Os.

Oh, and you may never feel totally comfortable on your bicycle again.
Also, if you can get a Folio Society editon (London, 2006), David Eccles' illustrations really capture the feel of the book, not to mention the beauty of this fine edition, typical of Folio Society's publications. show less

I rarely say that once I pick up a certain book, I can't put it down because the phrase is often hyperbole, but in the case of The Third Policeman, I actually found myself trying to read as much as possible in order to continue through the story. O'Brien's dry wit matched with social criticism mixed to create a brilliant and absurd masterpiece. The protagonist isn't necessarily likeable, but that's okay because his soul, Joe, makes up for what his host lacks. I don't think I will ever look at bicycles the same way again and not since Ulysses has a book of mine been filled with so many marginal notes. O'Brien wasn't shying away from experimentation which is at its best in the footnotes. It's easy to disagree with O'Brien when he proclaimed the only good thing about this novel is its plot. He has done things within these pages which Western readers think of as commonplace today and he's done them masterfully and to his own degree of absurd perfection. I would love to teach this in a course on either Anglo-Irish Literature or Absurdist Literature. It's brilliant.

This book operates on its own internal logic and is really hard to summarize as a result. In the beginning, the unnamed narrator - an orphan obsessed with the works of the (fictional) philosopher de Selby - is living with a man named Jack Divney who comes up with the idea of killing Old Mathers to fund the narrator's publishing of his critical work on said de Selby. They do so, and eventually Divney sends the narrator to Old Mathers' place to get the black box with money. In this cabin, he meets with Old Mathers, apparently alive again. From there, the oddities begin to pile up.

Definitely the only book I've ever read that was made less comprehensible by looking up words I was unfamiliar with, _The Third Policeman_ is pretty bizarre and way outside of my reading comfort zone. I read it because of the references to it on the TV show "Lost," which is why I persevered to the end instead of stopping at page 30. That being said, I'm glad I pressed on because once I got to the end I completely reinterpreted the events of the story, and I thought what the author accomplishes with the story is interesting. Still, it's the sort of book you have to really think about and almost works better for a discussion or classroom than for pleasure reading.

The craic runs strong with this one. At times I was exhausted by the relentless absurd whimsicality, until I embraced the fact that all there is is relentless absurd whimsicality, and in doing so it started becoming quite a bit profound. I did keep checking my pockets to see if I'd been pilfered by a hidden hand while being told a tall tale- relentlessly tall. Flawless prose, really enjoyable and creative prose more importantly. And in general just a real last hurrah for imagination and style

In this surreal and absurdist novel, a one-legged gentleman farmer is easily swayed into concocting the murder of a man believed to have a black box full of money. His partner in crime, the loathsome Divney, refuses to reveal the whereabouts of the black box for several years, ostensibly to avoid discovery. This forces the farmer to spend every waking moment in Diveny's shadow, for fear that he'll recover the box without sharing its contents. When the location of the box is finally revealed, the farmer goes off to retrieve it and discovers that old man Mathers, the man who was supposedly murdered, is actually alive and well. Trying to concoct another way of separating the box from his owner, the farmer devises a plan to go down to the police station to fill out a false theft report, only to discover that a world of strangeness and unpredictability awaits him. As the policemen revolve around him in nonsensical circles, the farmer discovers a secret plot involving the melding of bicycles and men (!!) that threatens to take over the countryside. He also learns that these seemingly benign men have the secret keys to eternity and the ability to create fabulous and wonderful inventions that defy the mind's capability to perceive them. Though puzzled by what the policeman present to him, he soon discovers he's in serious danger and his only hope for survival is a congregation of wandering one-legged men and a strangely female bicycle. Both uproariously funny and puzzlingly show more sinister, this work of comic genius written by Flan O'Brien was published posthumously in the 60's and is still as representative of the enigmas of life today as it was back then.

A few months ago I was at a party and met a wonderful girl by the name of Melissa who's studying literature in college. We got into a deep conversation about books and she told me she was taking a literature course based on the books that have appeared in the television series Lost. I was greatly intrigued by this class and wondered aloud why there were no classes like this when I was in college. As she was describing some of the books she was reading, she began to get very animated about this particular book. From what she told me, it sounded like a trip and a half, and like something that I just couldn't pass up. When she got to the part about the relationship between bicycles and humans, I knew I was going to read this book and it was going to be fantastic. I wasn't disappointed in the least and I can only assume that Flan O'Brien was a genius, not only in the way he creates this particular story but in its off-the-wall narration. It was one hell of a weird ride, but I must confess it made my top book of the year, which says a lot considering I've read some pretty good stuff.

This book is told through a deceptively simple style of prose. Though we know that the gentleman farmer is up to no good and is, in effect, a murderer, I couldn't help but get invested in his tale and come to feel for the man. When he finally goes to retrieve the black box from its hidden location, old man Mathers has some seriously disturbing and puzzling news for him. It's not very clear just what this news means, but the farmer is not only flummoxed and enraged, he's also scared and sets out to find a way to separate this box from its owner. The first sections of this book differed from all the rest in that most of it was easily comprehensible. Farmer, box and old man were eerily interpreted but pretty straightforward. Had this book continued on in this vein, it wouldn't have been anything to write home about. Luckily for me, the book picked up a lot of steam and became increasingly bizarre and funny as soon as the farmer stepped inside the police station.

As the farmer arrives at the station house, he realizes that its dimensions and attributes are physically impossible. This troubles him greatly and he begins to think that coming to the station to fill out a lost item form may have been a bad idea. He has no idea what's in store for him when he finally meets the first two policeman. These policeman are inordinately consumed with bicycles and question the man endlessly about them, a fact that the man doesn't understand at all. When a strange gentleman comes into the station and admits that his bicycle has been stolen again, the police mount a search for the missing bike and our perplexed farmer finds out that in this strange place, bicycles are a thing of intentional menace and danger. This confuses him and the reader shares his feelings of confusion and foreboding, knowing that there is much about the bicycles that we just cannot know. It's also very comical that there is so much malice and weirdness associated with the bicycles, and a lot of this story is utterly absurd and nonsensical. It's all a whirlwind of comic perplexity, and as such, the only thing I could do was let it wash over me with a sense of ludicrous wonder.

Meeting the second policeman puts the farmer at a greater sense of unease, for the man is an inventor of the highest order but his inventions make absolutely no sense in any way that inventions should. One example is the finely crafted box. This box is about palm-sized and is beautifully inlaid with intricate carvings and gold. As the farmer examines the box, he comes to discover that this box hold two hundred identical boxes of the same quality, each small enough to fit inside the other. The smallest box is so tiny that the naked eye cannot discern it, and this, in addition to all the other wild inventions, has a frightening effect on the farmer. As more and more inventions are introduced to the farmer, he becomes increasingly more afraid for reasons the reader can't understand, and decides that he will no longer speak to the second policeman for fear of what may happen to him. Some of these inventions are amazingly bizarre and mystifying and others are silly and nonsensical. The reaction of the farmer is one that confuses the reader and it's not until the end of the book that we understand why.

When the policeman reveal their knowledge of the farmer's misdeed, they decide to build a gallows and hang him. Despite the fact that they have shown him their fabulous inventions and the secrets of eternity, they must punish him for his crime, and set off to get things prepared. This is when the farmer remembers the deal he struck with the leader of a strange band of one legged men, and he calls to him for help. When a female bicycle comes to his aid, the farmer escapes to the hovel of the third policeman and learns the truth about all he has seen and heard. This third policeman is off the grid and is operating under the guise of secrecy. He reveals the real secret of eternity that is hidden to all but him and he shares all his secrets with the farmer. Now the farmer is deathly afraid and goes to seek out old Divney for help. But when he reaches Divney, things become frighteningly clear to him and the farmer realizes just what has happened to him and why he's trapped in this absurd and strange conundrum. All of this sounds menacing but it's also comically brilliant and unlike anything I've ever read before.

I know my review of this book doesn't do it justice, and frankly, I doubt if any review ever could. It was a strange amalgam of farce, satire and horror, and told a fantastical tale that kept me flipping pages to see what O'Brien would come up with next. Nothing was predictable or ordinary, and even the hidden nuances of the book were strangely surreal and wildly funny. A lot will probably never make sense to me, and in a way it reminded me a lot of Alice's time in Wonderland. It had the same feel of crafty nonsensicalness and was full of amazing and unorthodox components that made the whole wildly atypical and divergent from anything I have ever read before. If you're in the mood for something strange that will knock your socks off, this is the book for you! It's a book I will be pondering over for a long time. show less

I stumbled on this I don't know how, but what a fortuitous chance! The story of an irish guy besotted with the fictional philosopher de Selby (lots of footnotes / excerpts about the fantastical de Selby). Our character becomes enamored a plan to steal a strong box full of money in an old man's house and things don't go well. Soon he is a fairly twisted kind of Ireland with odd policemen constantly checking mysterious dials and visiting an intriguing eternity nearby. I hesitate to describe too much but this one is re-reader for sure. I adored this book.

"The Third Policeman" is an astonishing book. At the same time I realize it most certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea. It is a smart, whimsical, and entertaining tale of an Irishman who, intending to improve his lot, winds up making it mystifyingly complicated. O'Brien weaves a tale that includes murder, scholarship, bicycles, and extraordinary items of minutiae. Throw in a dose of silliness and philosophical disputations and you have an amazing story. If you insist that your stories be painfully rational, this isn't a book for you. But if you enjoy smart, mind-stretching humor, this is definitely worth your time.

A man of dubious morals and a wooden leg is convinced to join a robbery, which turns into a murder. He returns to the victim's house years later to recover a stolen cash box, and finds the victim, seemingly alive, in the house. Things get much stranger after that, involving two-dimensional police barracks, half-human bicycles, and a place where time does not go forward.

This is the most bizarre book I have ever read. Everything is very funny at first, and then without fail goes to a very weird place. There are a series of references and footnotes about a nonexistent scientist named De Selby, who is completely wrong about everything, and whose ideas are being kept alive by a series of commentators. The execution is hilarious — All of De Selby's theories are complete nonsense, and the commentators explain them as lapses in judgement of the otherwise profound thinker. For example, De Selby thinks night is caused by 'black air.' All of this is very funny, enough so that the footnotes about De Selby that span many pages just add to the comedy. And then they start getting weird — the last few footnotes assert that De Selby couldn't tell the difference between men and women, and then imply that most of the commentators are in fact the same mentally unbalanced person publishing under different names. Which, if wikipedia is to be believed, is taken directly from the author's own life ("He allegedly would write letters to the Editor of The Irish Times complaining about his own show more articles published in that newspaper").

On balance, it's a brilliant novel: I have read few things that are as funny, as horrible, as uncomfortable. And certainly nothing that was all three. show less

In and out, in and out the window. Flann O'Brien weaves his surreal reality complete with bogus footnotes concerning the lunatic ramblings of a bird brained ontologist, people who turn into bicycles through prolonged contact, and bicycles who turn into people, a general obsession with bicycles, 2D police stations, a legion of one-legged vigilantes, miniature boxes whose contents drive one to madness, a murderer who may or may not meet the man he has murdered. Thoroughly insane, deeply darkly hilarious, this book is a must for readers who like their drollery tinged with nightmare, or conversely, like their nightmares tinged with drollery. If you think Poe and Dostoevsky are overlooked as humorist, you will probably think O'Brien is a scream. Though he is often compared to his compatriot and contemporary, Joyce, I see little likeness except for a taste for the random and absurd.

I keep recommending this book to people but can never come close to doing it justice. It's as silly as it is serious, as shallow as it is disquieting: a Carrollian horror-farce of crime, (meta)physics, satire, bicycles and rural Irishness, unparalleled and non-perpendicular in its uniqueness.

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 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.

I had figured out this was in the vein of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or The Man Who Was Thursday, but the ending was even neater than I anticipated. A fabulous piece of absurdism, both funny and unsettling, told in a dry and elliptical tone in a distinctly roundabout Irish way.

This is the black stuff, all right - pure genius wrapped in a satire of an enigma of a riddle on a bicycle. Comedy writing at speed with the breaks off. A real pleasure.

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).

Delightfully absurd, witty and (apparently) random, this rambling story took me many places I did not expect to go before spitting me out with that sense of "what on earth was that all about?". O'Brien plays tricks with the reader's perceptions as he explores all the trivial, tangential forces that shape our consciousness in ways that remain just beyond our grasp. So it is entirely fitting that his novel remains, for this reader at least, tantalisingly impossible to pin down. May 2020.

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 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.

I liked this much more than At Swim Two Birds, which I found deeply and needlessly confusing. Third Policeman felt more straightforward to me and had a sort of absurd and melancholy charm to it. Not sure I'll dive into anymore Flann O'Brien, but I'm glad I picked this one up if only because of it's obvious fondness for bicycles and it's rather clever ending.

This is a surreal and funy book where anything can happen and often does. Bicycles are obsessed over and fallen in love with, eternity is reachable by lift, the king of the one legged men can pull together a one legged army at short notice, policemen carve tiny wooden boxes smaller than specks of dust etc etc. The footnotes about the fictional philosopher, de Selby, were some of my favourite bits - his theories on the dark, travel, sleep and so on are fantastical and hilarious. It's an endlessly inventive book and great fun to read, though at it's heart is a dark message about guilt, punishment and death.

A genuinely funny and odd novel, that may have been dampened/spoiled by O'Brien's note at the end, which gives away the ending and kills the suspense of the last 30 pages. DO NOT FLIP TO THE END OF THE BOOK! I like reading all the notes at the end of these fancy editions, but usually they don't contain spoilers.

A hilariously metaphysical comedy riffing on the nature of subjectivity and the everything-goes world of atomic relativity. O'Brien applies this weird version of Reality in a good satire of society---the police continually trying to 'control' the world, even when it is only themselves causing the chaos.

The end of the book did lag, but overall a very good read.

Bizarrely good. An aura of strangeness tinged the first few pages, and then it intensified, and then there was a surreal tumble down the rabbit hole into a very curious world. A place where "...the trees were active where they stood." You need to "use your internal imagination".
Descriptions and events and expounded philosophies sort of made a weak and tenuous sense. The edge of sense. Until you realise it was making no sense at all and you were lost again. But then another promising thread of logic is offered and eagerly grasped. It only takes you deeper.

Some of the incidental descriptions of the land, the surroundings, were beautiful. "The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens. Birds were stirring and the great kingly trees were being pleasingly interfered with by the first breezes."
"The road...ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way."
Time and space are interchangeable. "... he led the way heavily into the middle of the morning." This is not logical, yet it makes sense.
Inanimate things don't become animated but they do assume a different essence, all explainable by the Atomic Theory. Which again made a weird sort of illogical sense.
"...you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is"

A delightful, bendy-mind kind of book that will take your brain out for a run, and then won't return it to the same show more spot. show less

Wallace Steven's wrote in the opening of his "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction"

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
This inconceivable idea of the sun

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Flann O' Brien seems to have succeeded in becoming ignorant of most of what makes the world work (and make sense) before assuming the role of narrator and protagonist in this absorbing, fantastical ride through a rural Ireland that (I fear?/hope?) doesn't exist.

After being led into participating in a murder/robbery (no spoiler here - it's in the opening line of the book), our narrator finds that he has slipped into a world just beyond the one he's spent his life within, and this world is running on some other set of rules and a logic that seems both bizarre and convincing. Throughout his perigrinations through this alternate world, our protagonist seems to find something akin to hope and normalcy whenever he is outdoors or where he can observe and appreciate nature, but seems to slip into confusion and depression when indoors. Is the author commenting on nature vs the man-made (or man-imagined) world, or is it simply easier to give the character a break from the strain of this odd world by letting him walk in the sunshine once in awhile. Our protagonist seems to have slipped down the rabbit hole and, as is always the case in such alternate worlds, everyone except our show more rather poor choice of hero seems to find this world perfectly normal. I say poor choice simply because he's not very heroic, and not that easy to like at first. On the other hand, he's the perfect protagonist/narrator, in that he shares his view of this strange world he's dropped into with marvelous flair. There is a continuous sense of being lost when reading this story, but never so lost that you can't imagine finding a familiar path just around the next corner.

Accompanying the narrative is a running commetary (with footnotes) of the philosophical, metaphysical, and pseudo-scientific writings and life of a (luckily) fictional Professor.de Selby, along with his many critics and commentators. One could see how the world our narrator finds himself in could be, in some ways, the world that de Selby posits as the real world in his writings. But it's curious that the narrator has such a high regard for de Selby, while noting in each citation just one more of de Selby's theories that don't hold water. The narrator seems to be convinced that de Selby must be brilliant partly because de Selby is difficult to comprehend, and partly because his ideas don't seem to align with reality. de Selby seems to be the classic 18th-19th century English eccentric and the narrator takes him to be worthy of note primarily due to his social status.

I'm uncertain about the way the running commentary on de Selby fits in. It seems to suit the tone and point of view of the novel, but it's significance, beyond the observations made above, escapes me. However, the main story itself is a blast to read; the characters are just bizarre enough to provide many chuckles; the workings of this strange world are fascinating to contemplate; and our hero's situation and attempt to extricate himself from it succeeds in gaining our support (not bad for a murderer and robber).

This classic work would suit many sci-fi fans, or anyone else who enjoys slipping into a parallel reality once in awhile. A recommended read.

Os.

Oh, and you may never feel totally comfortable on your bicycle again.

Also, if you can get a Folio Society editon (London, 2006), David Eccles' illustrations really capture the feel of the book, not to mention the beauty of this fine edition, typical of Folio Society's publications. 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 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.

Loved this, typical O'Brien genius, with hell being depicted as nothing more than a skewed and repeating version of normality. Not for lovers of normal narrative, but this author was always about challenging assumptions about society, identity, language, intellectualism, and morality.

What to make of The Third Policeman? Here is a deliciously warped tale of bicycles and country policeman, a perversely hilarious meditation on death and the temptation to exist (anticipating a phrase from Cioran), with earnest reflections on the eccentric behavior and ideas of the mysterious savant de Selby, for whom human existence is both an hallucination and 'a succession of static experiences.'

This is a strange good read. Despite the absurdity of the narrative, there is beauty and wisdom in O’Brien’s prose. Life, he would have us believe, is just an aside. And what follows is foolish to prepare for.

“Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it, for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."

Woodstock Inn Pig’s Ear Brown Ale
Stone Ruination IPA

James Joyce ve Samuel Beckett'la beraber İrlanda edebiyatının Kutsal Üçlü'sünü oluşturan Flann O'Brien, doğumunun yüzüncü yılında Türk okurlarıyla buluşuyor. Adı bu üçlünün hep en sonunda anılsa da 20. yüzyılın en büyük yazarlarından biridir O'Brien. Parodi ve hicvi muzipçe kullanarak dilin anlamı iletmede, hatta oluşturmada üstlendiği kurgusal rolü alaşağı etmesiyle ve gerçeklik dediğimiz kurgunun maskesini düşürmesiyle, Avrupa henüz postmodern kelimesini duymamışken postmodenist olmuş bir yazardır o.
Absürdün kinayesi olarak ancak Alice Harikalar Diyarında'yla kıyaslanabilecek olan Üçüncü Polis bir cinayet romanı, İnsan ile bisikleti arasındaki hassas ilişkinin öyküsü ve bitmek bilmeyen suçluluk hissinin tüyler ürpertici masalıdır. Hayatını filozof De Selby'nin çalışmalarına adamış olan isimsiz anlatıcı, parası için ihtiyar Mathers'i öldürür. Ancak bir süre sonra kendisini ölü adamla karşı karşıya bulur. Para kutusunu arayışında yolu bir karakola düşecek, burada hayata bakışları ve uğraşları De Selby'ninkinden de tuhaf olan iki polisle tanışacak, üçüncü polisin gizemini çözebilene dek olağanüstü şeylere tanık olacaktır: Bisiklet gibi davranmaya başlayan insanlar, göreni (ya da ona dokunanı) delirten imkânsız bir renk, sonsuza dek küçülerek iç içe girmiş sandıklar...
Kurgusunun paradoksal yapısı ve kısır döngüsüyle hızla mekanikleşen show more modern dünyada makineleşen insanı ele alan Üçüncü Polis, kısa sürede kültleşmiş bir
çağdaş klasik.
"Hakiki bir mizah duygusuna sahip, gerçek bir yazar."
"Flann O'Brien'ın eserlerini yeterince takdir etmezsek büyük adamları hak etmeyen aptallarız demektir. Flann O'Brien çok büyük bir adam."
Anthony Burgess show less

This starts off as normal as you like and then suddenly, like Alice down the rabbit hole while taking LSD, takes you on a mind-bending and, at times, literarily taxing voyage into the bizarre towards an ending that has a great twist followed by a wry comment on eternity.

I could probably just stop there…

…but I won’t, because there’s more to say about this quirky novel which almost never got published. O’Brien explores a theme which many of us will have to explore personally at some point. Well, all of us actually. And in doing so, raises some important questions, such as how important bicycles actually might be for the future of humanity.

I think that might just about do it. Oh, other than to say that if you, like me, find the bonkers nature of events and conversations once you go down the rabbit hole a tad tedious, have a rethink about that when you’ve got to the end. It put things in perspective for me and made me grateful that tedium is one thing I’m pretty sure I won’t have to endure.

Hope you can say the same thing.

There may be something wrong with a book that requires an explanatory note from the publisher at the end just so you can figure it out. I read this book because it was supposed to shed some insight into what’s going on in the TV show Lost, and indeed, there are several parallels. There is a strange world that doesn’t operate according to the laws of physics. There is an underground place where a mysterious substance called omnium produces whatever you like, much like Lost‘s “magic box.” There are also three strange-looking policemen who are obsessed with bicycles and taking meaningless recordings, who make their police barracks inside a two-dimensional house and the walls of a mansion, and who tend to describe difficult things as “a pancake” (whereas pancakes are actually very easy). If you’re looking for clarification, you won’t find it here, I’m afraid.

I do get that hell is repetition, and this is O’Brien’s vision of hell. While I don’t find the book to be particularly funny, despite its description as a comic novel, it is, despite its absurdity, very readable, and that’s what saves it for me. I may not understand everything that’s going on, but I do want to find out what happens next. How it all relates to the endless footnotes about the fictional wacko philosopher de Selby, who is the obsession of the no-name narrator — well, maybe I’ll let someone else figure that out.

In and out, in and out the window. Flann O'Brien weaves his surreal reality complete with bogus footnotes concerning the lunatic ramblings of a bird brained ontologist, people who turn into bicycles through prolonged contact, and bicycles who turn into people, a general obsession with bicycles, 2D police stations, a legion of one-legged vigilantes, miniature boxes whose contents drive one to madness, a murderer who may or may not meet the man he has murdered. Thoroughly insane, deeply darkly hilarious, this book is a must for readers who like their drollery tinged with nightmare, or conversely, like their nightmares tinged with drollery. If you think Poe and Dostoevsky are overlooked as humorist, you will probably think O'Brien is a scream. Though he is often compared to his compatriot and contemporary, Joyce, I see little likeness except for a taste for the random and absurd.

The third policeman, is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym "Flann O'Brien". It was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished until his death from cancer in 1966. It was printed by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967.

The audiobook I got from my local Wilbor page, was read by the talented Jim Norton.

While I was almost continuously annoyed by the wacky theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he did introduce the "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles. We also find 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 that he NAMED "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and complete contradictions that three eccentric policeman bring him.

What a strange, and different kind of story...! Third Policeman is a fantastic work of imaginative fictional wonder that by the end somehow manages to become a bit exasperating in all its fantastic imaginative wonderfulness. It's like, when someone you know well, and like, who starts telling you one sort of story. Then he gets distracted, and the story becomes about something else entirely along the way.... And you don't mind at all, because it's charming, and rather different. Even though it happens again.

While this story meanders all over show more this strange countryside, it didn't bother me one whit. The narrator being used for this audiobook was VERY good. Every 'voice' was completely different. Every accent flawless and smart. Even the French pronunciations. Even though it was all done by one man. All slang and jargon used like the narrator understood them completely. This truly does not happen very often...!

Each chapter by itself is a kind of magical and mind-bending set piece illustrating baffling physical and metaphysical conundrums, paradoxes, absurdities, and improbabilities, but this is perhaps a situation where the pieces are greater than the whole (a standout example is MacCruiskeen’s ever-diminutive reproductions of boxes falling away into the invisibly miniscule, a wonderful metaphor for the metafictive act). Though I was growing a bit impatient with it toward the end, I believe this book still points the way toward Flann O’Brien being some kind of mad genius of wordsmithery, and it is a book both hilarious and deeply unsettling. It took me all night to ruminate about this story, after it ended.

The novel takes place in what we are given to believe is an eternally recurring afterlife, where no greater intelligence or divinity is present, or if one is present, it's been shattered into traces that cannot be coherently reassembled -- infinity, authority, & punishment. The Third Policeman is a narrative closed loop and resists explication.

When he was unable to find a publisher for this, his second novel, Flann O'Brien famously stashed the manuscript away in a drawer and told his friends that it had been lost. The book is also very, very funny. It's one of the very best modern novels, and, sadly, because it was written very early in his career, the finest thing Flann O'Brien ever wrote. Overall, the book grips the reader and refuses to let go. It is creepy, confusing, and a touch haunting. I may have to pick up more from this author if they are written anything like this one!

(Last night I was listening to the audiobook with headphones on, in bed. My hubby turns out the light, looks over at me, rapt with attention and smiling weirdly, and says, "ok honey, time to go to sleep....?" "Hold on a minute. This dude is falling in love with a bicycle." "Um......... What.....?" "Don't worry, it's female." Weird looks continue for some time towards me, until the hubby finally turns over, shaking his head, and goes to sleep.)

Highly recommended, highly enjoyed. Let me reiterate- this Irishman is a magician of the highest order and is not to be ignored.



« The Third Policeman » illustrations > James Kenny - http://ow.ly/xbJ3u . show less

The Third Policeman is an unusual novel: a humorous tale with a ridiculous premise and a keen sense of the marvelous, one that should be enthralling and fascinating, and yet somehow never quite kicks into the expected gear. It may be an important work, but it was something of a disappointment to me.

The story revolves around the exploits and travels of our unnamed narrator, who agrees with his friend John Divney to participate in the violent murder of an old man named Mathers. After botching the job up right good, our hero(?) goes off to acquire a box filled with money in the dead man's house, only to set off a series of increasingly bizarre and fantastical encounters that don't just border on the absurd, but embrace it lovingly.

Sadly, the most humorous portions of the book are the most benign. The two policemen who mostly deal with the narrator speak frequently in non sequiturs and rattle on for pages of dialogue that, at its peak, can leave one giggling or laughing out loud throughout. Unfortunately, the staidness of the narrator's disbelieving tone -- a trait whose purpose doesn't become obviously necessary until the novel's surprise ending -- cuts through the humor and renders too much of the novel at much too slow a pace. If this was the author's intent, it was executed well, but it disrupts the flow of this short novel and makes it surprisingly difficult to read.

The moments of absurdity, including but not limited too meditations on bicycles, the location of eternity, show more and the outlandishly incorrect theories of the fictional philosopher de Selby, while not all amusing, are similarly too disruptive after a while to be truly effective. Footnotes that begin small but eventually stretch for pages at a time hit a tone of humor that is more academic and highbrow, and thus a nice touch, but also obstruct the flow of the narrative more than I would have liked.

Ultimately, though the novel has its moments of brilliance and humor, the final effect is too uneven, and the experience of reading it too similarly lopsided, to have really gripped me like I was expecting. Perhaps I went in with excessive expectations, but The Third Policeman was more of a letdown than I was hoping. show less

I first read "The Third Policeman" 50 years ago. Then, I found it confusing but humorous; now, I find it comparable to "Crock of Gold" by James Stephens but with more playful use of language. It's a surreal fantasy, well within the Irish fable tradition, with a bit of a mystery. What caught my eye in this reading was the wild use of words (similar to the humor of Norm Crosby) and quirky metaphors. The central story, about a murder in the execution of a robbery and the recovery of the loot, is almost secondary to the surreal encounters in a magical landscape. I enjoyed suspending my disbelief and going with the flow.

Published in 1967, O'Brien's weird novel was written in 1939-40 and published a year after his death. I found myself losing patience with it, struggling to understand what was going on in the macabre world that O'Brien portrays. As I approached the final couple of chapters I had a good idea of where the novel was going; I don't want to spoil it for other readers, but I wish someone had spoilt it for me. I might then have been able to appreciate more of the silliness that had gone on before; particularly the conversations in the police barracks. I am not going to re-read it in order to discover the pearls of wisdom that some other readers have found, it wasn't that intriguing for me.

It is difficult to pigeonhole the book although it often appears in the genre of science fiction. I would be more inclined to think of it as a horror story with plenty of black humour. It would certainly appeal to bicycle lovers and to readers who might be in-tune to O'Brien's sense of humour. Perhaps the notion that people become as one with their bicycles because of the continual displacement of atoms as they ride their bone-shakers on the rough roads make it appear as science fiction, after all O'Brien goes out of his way to explain through one of his characters how this happens, or perhaps the continual reference to the madder than most scientist de Selby clinches it for some people. I remain unconvinced

My own view is that the book has been overhyped as a rediscovered masterpiece of show more modernist literature, but I did in the end learn to like it better, the more I read of it, but not enough to give it more than three stars. show less

Pay attention now. In order to enjoy this book, you must mix equal parts of:

Kafka

Borges

Douglas Adams

LSD

Stir carefully. If your head hurts, put it down for a while and take an aspirin. Other than that, it's brilliant. Just brilliant.

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

This is an insane book. I mean that in the best way, I really do: So much bizarre stuff happens in this book, you have to turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride.

Policemen obsessed with bicycles. Wooden-legged men. Murderers. Eternity. It's all here, and it's all worth reading. What a pancake!

What a strange, abstract tale, beautifully crafted, but one I find impossible to describe. Was it clever or crazy? I'm still not sure of that, but the Irish wit was simply glorious. I was delighted to hear old Irish words that until now I've only heard my grandmother use. My copy is an audiobook with outstanding narration by Jim Norton.

A novel I never get tired of. The stark insanity of Sergeant Pluck's lines ("Would it surprise you to learn that the Atomic Theory is at work in this parish?") continues to delight at every reading.

For those who haven't: the (anti-)hero becomes trapped in a surreal and distorted version of his Irish village, where (as his soul, Joe, points out) "anything can be said and will be true and will have to be believed." The surreality is delightful, but so is the style. Here's the magnificent opening paragraph:

"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a 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. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for."

A man commits a murder, then becomes involves in a series of philosophical discussions about bicycles. Uh, no, that's not it. A man commits a murder then encounters two strange policemen, including one engaged in building a series of smaller and smaller boxes. No, that's not it either. A man is obsessed with an obscure author, de Selby, who believed the world was shaped like a sausage--but that has little to do with the murder despite all the footnotes, so that's not it either. How about a man is cheated by another man, whom he trusts so little, he has to sleep with him every night to be sure he isn't stealing stuff. Well, that's not quite it either. This book is reputed to be funny, but it is much more odd than it is funny. In one sense, it is like the work of Eric McCormack, which I absolutely love, in its obsession with odd events and one-legged men, but The Third Policeman lacks the real heart and soul and pleasure that McCormack's books provide. The Third Policeman is enjoyable, and not overlong, but it never really fully satisfied me as a reader.

The audiobook is very well read.

There's something about Irish writers: Swift, Laurence Sterne, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien and their ability to take the commonplace, the mundane even, and transpose it into something rich and strange (to quote Shakespeare), something at once horrifying and hilarious.
Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman" is at once a parody of the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction, modern physics and just plain silliness. But where does one stop and the other begin?

I spent most of my time reading this book with my brow furrowed in a sort of "What the...?" expression, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. Those who like to imagine the look of a scene while reading will have a fiendish but delightful time trying to get their heads around some of the descriptions in this story, and the dialogue and premise are first-rate. Still, a difficult one to recommend for any who are not prepared for one of the more bizarre reads they may encounter.

I did not actually "like" it that much, for it baffled me and blew chaos into my brain, but it might just be a formidable pancake if only for that.

It is as likely to go away now as "Infinite Jest" is, and it runs to about a fifth of the latter book's length. But I digress. This book is devoid of sense, but it manages to thrive like an anthill full of stupid little creatures acting in close accord. It is one brain slug of a book and if I made myself wonder why you should not read it, I wouldn't be able to come up with an answer.

This is the most perplexing conundrum of a book that I have ever read. It is the work of a sheer brilliant comic genius. I bought it because I heard that it was the inspiration behind the TV programme Lost. Along the way the reader encounters mad policemen who are obsessed with bicycles, murderers, amazing theories related to physics, time and size and the wackiest footnotes ever. This is the most fantastic flight of fantasy which will make you ask yourself countless questions - and the ending is mind blowing.

Perhaps I do not share the Irish sense of humor. This novel is consistenly described as a comic masterpiece. True, the send-ups of scholarly commentary, in the form of footnotes upon the fictional philosopher de Selby, are amusing to an academic mind. But they are inbedded in a tale every step of which must make the thinking reader wonder why one should care about the protagonist. The protagonist is a murderer of a particularly vile and mindless type, who becomes lost in a surreal landscape while searching for the moneybox he hopes to find in his victim's home. He meets his victim, unaccountable come back to life; the king of the one legged men, among whom he is numbered; policemen with wild theories of atom interchange between bicycles and their riders; and a lift that leads to an underground complex which he is told is eternity. His adventures bemuse but do not engage, since at no point does he seem to engage seriously with his own deeds or his surroundings. When he is contemned to hang for another crime, which he did not commit, he never meditates about the essential justice of his position. Even when his victim seems to reappaer in the form of the third policeman of the title he is only bewildered, never chastened. This work may be, as the notes describe it, a surreal presentation of hell, but it is a hell deprived of meaning.
The narration by Jim Norton is performed masterfully. Each character is distinct and intriguing as voiced.

A good surreal, absurd yarn that boggles the mind and provokes it to engage. I'm very glad this was not the key to Lost!

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.

A comic novel that has a dream-like quality and is also fable-like. The main character commits a murder in the first few pages. After some unnerving encounters he ends up at a police station where people merge with their bicycles and bicycles merge with their humans. They explore an underground world where anything is possible and the tensions is high when he is considered guilty. The section on the joy of riding the perfect bicycle is marvellous. Plenty that made me laugh out loud and other sections that made no sense at all.

This is a great book. Its weird and has a great use of language. People keep saying its really funny but it has such a dark, odd edge to it.
Apart from the protagonist you have occasional interruptions by the main characters newly found soul, as well as digressions involving a mad philosopher that the protagonist is obsessed with.
I generally dislike the surreal, some things like Alice in Wonderland or Doctor Faustroll seem to be just weird for the sake of weird. This however is nicely grounded so that the bizarre stands out even more without things becoming too disjointed.
Overall highly interesting, great turn of phrase, nicely weird, in fact after reading it from the library i'm definitely going to buy a copy for future perusal.

The Third Policeman by Flan O'Brien I couldn't believe it when I read the spoiler right in the front of the newer edition. How dumb is that?
 
Luckily I had read this book before, in fact several times.I'd rate this as one of the best 12 books in my life and would recommend for anyone to read it especially if you like cycling or feel an affinity to the Irish imagination.A truly staggering story that will take your breath away and leave you light headed, smiling and never quite willing to take everyday events at face value ever again. You will most certainly never be able to ride a bicycle without this book appearing somewhere in your consciousness and making you smile. I still can't look at a cracked ceiling without retracing my steps as to how I got into this room.I have also noticed the word Banjaxed appearing from time to time and a knowing smile will creep across my face.Of course none of this telling you anything about the book. I think I am alluding more to the experience of reading it rather that the content of the book. If my house were on fire I'd grab this book.

Another great work from Flann O'Brien. Delightfully weird, though it all comes together in the end. And, as usual, hilarious. (If you're a fan of _Lost_ you may already know that a character on the show was shown reading this book at one point, for a second or less. It's fun to read this book with that in mind as well. Almost certainly true that the readers/creators of that show had read this book before they even started. Lots of interesting resonances.)

What an oddly satisfying book.

And it really has no right to be satisfying. It smacks somewhat of being a book written in 1940. And it was, effectively, never accepted – only seeing print in 1967, one year after the author’s death. (Oh yeah, Flann O’Brien is not the author; it is the pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan.) And why would anyone accept this book for publication. It is the story of a man who, with an accomplice, commits a rather heinous crime. They mark time until they can receive their ill-gotten gains. Separated from his accomplice, the pursuit of those gains leads him to a police station which resides in something akin to Alice’s Wonderland. Interspersed throughout the book are quotes and references to research regarding the philosopher de Selby - footnotes that, at first, contain short references but, by the end of the book, almost take over individual chapters with stories of those who have researched de Selby. (Oh yeah, there is no such person as de Selby. In fact, that’s how I got hold of this book when my sister asked about the philosopher and, after glancing at the book, I questioned the reality of such an individual.) And, with all that against it – it still works. On some unusual level, it works. No, it isn’t an easy read, but a book with interesting intricacies that are worth pursuing. The blurbs indicate the author is a comic genius. Comic is not the word I would use. Surreal and bizarre – yes. And the end is perfect. (Hint, in this show more edition, don’t read the introduction – it will give the ending away. It’s not that I think the ending is particularly surprising, but, since I read it before reading the book, I don’t really know.)

(Note to self. I planned on reading Gravity’s Rainbow next. Maybe I’ll take a break first. I think I better find something a little lighter first.) show less

An unusual book, to be sure. Its closest counterpart might be Alice in Wonderland, but where Alice has whimsy, clever wordplay, unforgettable characters, and the most quotable dialogue this side of Shakespeare, The Third Policeman has a strangeness, an obsession with bicycles, and a rather limited palette of actors and settings.

It sparked into life on a few occasions (most notably in the discussion of DeSelby, a philosopher/physicist who never appears but whose ideas are revealed at length), but was ultimately a bit wearying. The final chapter had some power--I can imagine the same book at half the length (just cut any reference to a bicycle) and it would be much more satisfying.

(Probably bicycles are metaphors for something and if I figured it out I'd enjoy the book 1000 times more, but I didn't, so I didn't).

I read this a long long time ago and while so many books have fled from my mind, not this little beauty. Wildly imaginative, wildly witty, wildly brilliant, and deep as a Pookah's pocket. There's so much here, how does one even begin to review such a thing? The invention alone would take more space than allowed, boyo.

I think this is my first Flan O'Brien. A weird story but surprisingly entertaining. Set in rural Ireland, its a tale of murder, bicycles, other dimensions. Those Irish can sure tell tall tales. The ending is great but giving it away would be a shame.

"Is it about a bicycle?"

To explain what this book is about would be to spoil it - it only makes sense once the reader reaches the end and things become clearer, which isn't to say clear. The book is funny, idiosyncratically, funny as in amusing, funny as in confusing, and funny also as in weird. Superficially, it is also clever, but the bits I thought were clever at first did not completely add up upon consideration; his would be recherché references are all made up, some obviously so. What this book does have to recommend it though, aside from the peculiar brand of humour, is the confusion afforded to the reader. Confusion is not normally a good thing, but here it plays a vital part of the story, as the character is in a state of confusion for a good proportion of the book, which the reader must partake in also to be able to appreciate what, against the odds, turns out to be a surprisingly well cobbled together piece of fiction.

The Third Policeman is a philosophical satire with objects growing so small that they are invisible, men that become bicycles and bicycles that become men, dead men that speak their minds, and many more absurdities.

Anything can be said in this place, and it would be true, and would have to be believed.
--from The Third Policeman

Each absurdity and character is addresses and spoken about in a matter of fact way, so that despite the narrator's astonishment, it all seems almost ordinary in that that is the way in which the world works there. It reminds me of Through the Looking Glass in that the characters speak in logically illogical ways. Their theories are absurd to an outsider, but quite clear and self explainitory to them.

The Third Policeman is therefore a highly intellectual rather than emotional work. The humor comes from wit and wordplay, not slapstick. So that you find your self drawn rather matter-of-factly into the mind bending philosophical puzzles rather than actually caring about the characters. It is interesting because the reader, like the narrator, is trying to understand, trying to make it all fit without paradox into their mind.

I find it a great strain for me to believe what I see, and I am becoming afraid occasionally to look at somethings for fear they will have to be believed.
--from The Third Policeman

I found myself feeling like I was missing something, not quite getting the joke. I wondered if there might not be some cultural context that I, as an show more Californian, was not privy to. Was the satire, like so many others, dependent upon the cultural references being made? I had no way of answering that, and since I was listening to it on audio book, I found myself allowing the absurdities to pleasantly wash over me without striving too hard for the meaning.

I find myself wanting to approach it again, this time in print with the hopes that I might nail some of it down in my mind, though I doubt that will ever be entirely possible for me. Rather I think it will be a book I come to again and again, and find some new discovery in each time. show less

What an absurd, nonsensical absurdity this book is.

Yes, I read it because of the Lost references. It was written in 1940 and published in 1967. Had it been written in 1967 (as I first assumed), I would have attributed its wackiness to drugs.

The unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman is an orphan, a waster and a murderer. He owns a pub, but would prefer to spend his days absorbed in the academic study of a theorist named De Selby. His friend John Divney runs the pub on his behalf but becomes greedy, and the pair plot to murder Old Mathers for the contents of his black box, thereby freeing them both financially to pursue the lives they desire.

The murder takes place, but soon after the narrator finds himself stumbling on a two-dimensional building that appears to be a police station. This is where the craziness starts.

We're in the Irish countryside of the 1940s - and bicycles are being stolen everywhere, which concerns the occupants of the police station a great deal. Not only that, but the bicycles are more than bicycles - they are connected to their owners in some very disturbing ways. The narrator becomes quite disconcerted at the world in which he finds himself, and starts plotting a way to get home.

I should maybe have given this book more attention as I felt much more satisfied with it after reading the end. I admit that I skipped most of the footnotes (De Selby's theories are just as nonsensical as the rest of the book), but if you're a fan of the TV series Lost, it show more should enlighten you greatly if you're at all puzzled about Desmond's tasks in the Hatch, and of course the series finale. show less

This is a very bizarre book and one which I imagine will divide readers. It begins innocuously enough with a description of the narrator’s life following the death of his parents, and how he came to commit a murder. But this isn’t a straightforward tale of wrong-doings and things quickly become stranger. The rest of the book involves greed, guilt, eternity and bicycles!

Absurd is the best way to describe the book, with the situations and dialogue taking surreal turns. Sometimes there is comedy in the absurdity, other times it is nightmarish, or just plain infuriating for the reader.

Running alongside the actual “plot” (such as it is), is this book’s defining feature, its use of footnotes. The narrator has undertaken a project to collect together all the writings on a philosopher/scientist called de Selby and his thoughts (often quite tenuously) turn to the works of de Selby, so extensive footnotes are provided to explain the ideas of the man, and his numerous critics. Of course, de Selby is an entirely fictional character, but the author has created a whole body of work for him and his commentators. Although it was difficult to know how to read at the same time as the main novel, I enjoyed this part most because of the contrast between the ridiculousness of his theories and the serious academic tone of criticism.

This book was very different from anything else I’ve ever read. I would recommend it to others just on that basis, but make guarantee that anyone will show more like or even understand it. show less

From bizarre fantasy to sheer nonsense indeed...I really enjoyed the first part of the book, and the end, but the middle section was quite bewildering. I enjoyed the nonsense, but wonder if I wasn't quite in on the joke. I do like the idea that the world isn't spherical, but is in fact shaped like a sausage though!

audio fiction (3.5+ hrs), A thief/murderer has a surreal dreamlike experience with the Irish police.

I loved the narration (at 0.75 speed), it had terrific deadpan delivery; I wasn't able to follow the story as well due to my being easily distracted as well as the frequent digressions and nonsensical characters, but I enjoyed it. Reminds me a lot of Alice's adventures through the looking glass, with every character affected by his own unique madness.

I was originally attracted to this book after it was featured in an episode of Lost, where Jacob was reading it as J Locke was thrown out the window by his father. It took me a while to track down a copy of the book, and a while longer before I actually read it. The only other Irish author or book that I had read was Joyce's "Portrait of a Young Man..".

I found the book quite readable, and would have been even more so had I skipped the footnotes. The plot was fairly easy to follow, as much as I understood. The quirky concepts like the sausage universe and the bicycle personification were quite entertaining. The copy that I read had some footnotes in it, which helped me to understand some parts. I still really don't understand the entire bicycle concept, but it will prob make more sense if I ever read it again. Bicycles were very common back when the story was originally written, and prob had a definitive role in life in Ireland at that time. I thought the representation of eternity was good also.

It didn't work for me. Every once in a while I'd find something good or funny. De Selby was definitely one of the best things about this book. But a lot of it read like a sillier/less good version of Beckett. I think it's important not to be self-satisfied with your humor, and reading this book, I felt like O'Brien thought he was being so funny, when in fact he's just pulling out whatever is the next weirdest thing that can happen and sticking it in his story. A lot of the humor seemed way too obvious, like he was trying too hard.

There's profundity behind the slapstick and poetry bursting through– maybe forming part of– O'Brien's baffling world.

Overflowing with fine comic writing. It gets highly psychedelic at times. Something of a fusion of Kafka, Beckett and Alice in Wonderland.



Pretty much the most plausible version of Hell I've read.

Hilarious and absurd and surreal and beautifully strange. Great writing, great characters, great setting. I was disappointed to find that I didn't understand everything and it had to be explained in an author's note at the end.

Finding something 'too surreal' is probably a compliment, but this was a gruelling read. However, there were a few funny parts, mostly involving pancakes, and a neat ending to earn some credit. Reviews say Joyce would have been proud - now I'm even more afraid of Ulysses.

Like Joyce this book is more about structure than it is about plot. It's a whacky, weird tale within a tale within another tale. Don't worry what it's about or what's happening - just enjoy the way it unfolds.

SKIP THE INTRO! THE PUBLISHER GIVES AWAY THE TWIST! BUT DO READ IT! IT'S GREAT!

Book 221 - Flann O’Brien - The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien otherwise known as Brian O'Nolan wrote this interesting novel. I really struggled to get my head round what this story was actually about. The first half is a mish mash of tales about buried money…stolen bicycles…human bicycles (?) …a murder…death and secret worlds and so much more.

To sum this book up…well..I can’t…it is weird…it is disturbing…it is silly and brilliant…it is allegorical and it is literal…I think.

A must read … an incredible read…like ‘Twin Peaks’ taken up to 11 and 1/2

Funny, adroit, clever. Do not read the introduction first = spoilers.

Supremely absurd, but brilliantly witty.

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)

I adore this book. It is deeply cynical and very observant of Irish personalities and attitudes.

Some really funny and delightfully odd bits, but the awkward and yakky midsection did not gel for me.

Such a strange book. Utterly surreal at times, complete nonsense mostly. However I do like MacCruiskeen a little, and it's good for a chuckle now and then.

Hard to review and difficult to rate.
Interesting "wild" ride ... inventive and funny in places.
Have a feeling I'm missing some nuances

Not what I expected. Very funny, made me laugh on numerous occasions.

Strange book. What if heaven involves repeating the same frustrating yet fitting sequence of events over and over in world where bicycles are alive?

Flann O'Brien is supposed to be funny, but I would characterize this story as bizarre or odd rather than funny.

This book is too hard to critique with a rating. It's not for everyone, but I really admired the originality of the story.

This book was ahead of its time, and a very fascinating read. The book that brought me to this and 'At Swim Two Birds' was 'The Dalkey Archive'. My preference is for 'The Dalkey Archive', because it has a great sense of humour.

One should not look gift horses in the mouth, but 100 pages in this is not yet to my taste. Absurdist and grim, although vividly written.

(discontinued 12.25.07)

Creepy and wholly fantastic. Contains some of the more outrageous conversations I have ever read in a book.

It's all about bicycles. You will become as lost in this fantastic tale as in Kafka's The Trial.

Hilarious and bizarre, a real treat of a discovery.

A truly great book. One of the funniest ever written. A postmodern masterpiece.

All very strange. But probably very clever. Something unrelenting about it.

Interesting, infuriating, absurd, boring, intriguing. I didn't know what to make of this book.

A weird book. I didn't get anything from it. Pages and pages of rambling nonsense. If you're not looking to gain something from each book you read, and a book's task is just to help you pass the time, then go ahead.

I had to stop reading because I could not wrap my mind around this book. I feel like a terrible failure, especially when I see how excited everyone else seems to be.