The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Our March novel, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, will be Flann O'Brien's masterpiece, "The Third Policeman". Below is part of a review of the book from The Irish Times:

"Everything about The Third Policeman is mysterious, beginning with its belated publication. Flann O’Brien wrote it in 1939, immediately after At Swim-Two-Birds, but when it was rejected by several publishers put the manuscript in a drawer and told everyone it had been lost. Then, when At Swim was reissued in 1960 to universal acclaim, instead of following up with his masterpiece, O’Brien cannabalised it for a vastly inferior book, The Dalkey Archive. Why? In the words of the first policeman, Sergeant Pluck, “That is a great curiosity, a very difficult piece of puzzledom, a snorter”.

Then there is the question of what makes the book a masterpiece worthy of comparison with Kafka. This is another hard conundrum, a very nearly insoluble pancake. The novel appears to be mere whimsy about comical Irish policemen and bicycles – but it is eerily compelling in some profound way. Part of the answer may be that it was influenced by Kafka or drew on the same sources, or both. According to his biographer, O’Brien admired Kafka’s work, though, in his usual perverse and secretive way, he never acknowledged this and was often dismissive of Kafka in his newspaper column, (probably due to distaste for Kafka’s popularity with pretentious intellectuals).

Many of Kafka’s fictions are quest sagas based on the oldest narrative structure in literature (going back to the first work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh in 1000 BCE). In all these sagas the quest hero leaves his familiar surroundings to go in search of a magical object in an unknown world full of marvels and monsters, and eventually finds and brings back the grail, which confers special powers and meaning and transforms his world. In Kafka’s modern version the hero is unheroic, the monsters are big, bluff, hearty oafs in positions of authority and the objective of the quest is never achieved. In other words, the absurdity of the human condition is that the sensitive few are obliged to search for meaning when in fact there is no meaning – and this futile search will be constantly thwarted by insensitive brutes.

Michael Foley: Despite his view of physics as sinful, O’Brien would surely have been delighted by the discovery of particles within particles within particles, all the way down to unimaginable weirdness, and the revelation that the known universe is merely a tiny speck in something unimaginably vast."

"Michael Foley: Despite his view of physics as sinful, O’Brien would surely have been delighted by the discovery of particles within particles within particles, all the way down to unimaginable weirdness, and the revelation that the known universe is merely a tiny speck in something unimaginably vast."

"The Third Policeman works similar variations on the mythical structure. The unnamed quest hero and narrator is a scholar who, to fund publication of a scholarly work, robs and murders a man and is pitched into a nightmarish world where, in pursuit of a black box containing four ounces of a mysterious, all-powerful substance called omnium, he is subjected to miracles and wonders and threatened with execution by “horrible and monstrous” policemen, “heavy-fleshed and gross in body”. Needless to say, he never finds the black box but, in O’Brien’s unique twist, is doomed to repeat the quest in exactly the same way forever.

As with Kafka, what gives the fable its power is a combination of a religio-comic vision that sees seeking as spiritually essential but laughably futile and a fastidious style that enhances the comedy by deadpan delivery, the craziness by matter-of-fact logic and both by ridiculously prosaic detail (especially about bicycles). In O’Brien’s case the vision is a Manichean view of the world as the realm of evil in which, as he himself put it later, the “encounter between God and the rebel Lucifer” has “gone the other way”. As a consequence, all theories are crackpot, all knowledge is useless and the only meaning is that life is a hell of endless repetition. So the narrator encounters a succession of peculiar characters who offer consistently negative wisdom, including the conclusion that “No is a better word than Yes” and advice to desist not just from seeking truth, but from most forms of action because “the majority of them are definitely bad and are pretty considerable sins as sins go”. In fact life itself “is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon”....

continue reading this review at The Irish Times:
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-third-policeman-by-flann-o-brien-an-expert-investigation-1.2328019