"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 

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 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.