This is by Flann O'Brien, one of the many pen names adopted by Brian O'Nolan (1911-66).

It didn't appear until 1967, and its publishing history is curious. Henry Eliot (whose book club suggestion led me here in the first place) explains that it was the successor to O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (which was published in 1939, and received praise from luminaries such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce). On submitting The Third Policeman, however, O'Brien met with rejection: "We realize the author's ability," said the publishers, "but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so." He tried again, unsuccessfully, and eventually gave up, inventing various stories to explain that the manuscript was lost. Twenty years later, he recycled some of the material to create his 1964 novel, The Dalkey Archive. But The Third Policeman was not published until a year after O'Brien's death.

By the time I was reading it, I'd pulled out of Henry Eliot's book group, and was on my own. And with this book, it turned out, sinking rather than swimming... Initially, I found it totally weird, the most flummoxing thing I'd read in a while. To quote one of the policemen involved, I found it "nearly an insoluble pancake... a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter".

It opens, relatively conventionally, with a confession of murder:

"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a 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."

Then we backtrack to the never named narrator's circumstances. His parents are dead, leaving him in charge of a pub and farm that are managed by Divney while the narrator (I'll call him N) is away studying. Now he's back, pursuing his obsession with a "philosopher" named de Selby, and continuing to leave Divney, "idle-minded and a sparing worker", to somehow magic away the profits. When N is approaching 30, he and Divney suddenly become inseparable. What's with that, we wonder...

Well, it's because of the murder. The strongbox they steal from Mathers is hidden away by Divney until the furore over the murder (unsolved) has grown cold again. But N doesn't trust Divney not to make off with it one dark night, and therefore sticks to him like glue.

Eventually Divney decides the time is right, divulges the hiding-place for the loot (Mathers' former house), and sends N off to collect it.

N does indeed find the box. Touches it, even. But he doesn't quite grasp it. And then "something happened"...


I'm not at all a fan of this cover... "Naturally some colours are better than others," says old Mathers. "Some of them, like purple or maroon, are very bad and always mean an early grave. Pink, however, is excellent..." Not this pink, though, surely...

***

Be warned that from here on in, there are spoilers. Big ones... Stop reading if you don't want to know. Personally, I was actively looking for a spoiler-laden account by this time, as I felt so at sea with the novel...

The crucial key is that this moment when "something happened" is the point when N dies...

I'd read, somewhere, that he's dead by the time the rest of the story unfolds. I'd gone back and reread this section, and still couldn't spot the "join", as it were.

We'll get to the details in due course, but the Publisher's Note (discreetly placed at the end of my text) gives us a large clue. It reproduces the letter O'Brien wrote to his publisher in February 1940: "When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing. Towards the end of the book (before you know he's dead) he manages to get back to his own house where he used to live with another man who helped in the original murder. Although he's been away three days, this other fellow is twenty years older and dies of fright when he sees the other lad standing in the door. Then the two of them walk back along the road to the hell place and start thro' all the same terrible adventures again, the first fellow being surprised and frightened at everything just as he was the first time and as if he'd never been through it before. It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever -- and there you are."

Once you know that he's dead, you then see all sorts of clues in that scene at Mathers' house. In a very creepy passage (that's quite superbly done), he meets and talks to Mathers, for example. The dead man is not hostile, but he's distinctly spooky: "His face was terrifying but his eyes in the middle of it had a quality of chill and horror which made his other features look to me almost friendly... But the eyes were horrible... Occasionally the heavy cheese-like lids would drop down slowly with great languor and then rise again."

And the narrator kinds of divides... He hears a voice, making a comment on the situation, from "deep inside me, from my soul". He'd never thought before of having a soul, "but just then I knew I had. I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe. I felt a little reassured to know that I was not altogether alone. Joe was helping me." And indeed, Joe is the nicest character in the book...

N is also unable to remember his name. I don't know whether that's what happens to dead people, but really, this whole combination of circumstances should have given me a clue. It didn't. I had to have it spelled out.


Wexford, 2026. The dead Mathers' "voice had a peculiar jarring weight like the hoarse toll of an ancient rusty bell in an ivy-smothered tower". OK, this one needs a bit more ivy... The picture at the top is Wexford, too, and looks absolutely like the kind of building O'Brien would have written about

The conversation with Mathers is the first in a number of totally bizarre dialogues, because the book -- despite all this dead and creepy stuff -- is very, very funny.

It's also completely surreal... Here's Mathers talking some more about colours, and about policemen (the policemen we'll later start to hear so much of):

"'When I was born there was a certain policeman present who had the gift of wind-watching. The gift is getting very rare these days. Just after I was born he went outside and examined the colour of the wind that was blowing across the hill. He had a secret bag with him full of certain materials and bottles and he had tailor's instruments also. He was outside for about ten minutes. When he came in again he had a little gown in his hand and he made my mother put it on me.'
"'Where did he get this gown?' I asked in surprise.
"'He made it himself secretly in the backyard, very likely in the cowhouse...'"

Like you would...

***

Anyway, N starts to wonder whether these policemen, if they're so wise, can't help him find the black box that mysteriously disappeared... Why would they do that? But asking that kind of question is really not how this book works...

And then begins a succession of weird encounters. In their apparently two-dimensional police station, we meet the policemen themselves. Two of them, at first, because Policeman Fox won't make his entrance until much later. Both are obsessed with bicycles... And both are involved with mysterious "readings". Sergeant Pluck is also a teeth-fancier, while Policeman MacCruiskeen is a builder of miniature worlds, creating matryoshka-like sets of boxes that culminate in something "nearly as small as nothing".

It's the bicycles and the readings that have the most plot attached to them, though. The Sergeant engineers bicycle thefts in order to prevent people (through prolonged contact with their two-wheeled aids) from turning into bicycles themselves. This process is all down to Atomic Theory, Pluck explains: "People who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles... When a man lets things go so far that he is half or more than half a bicycle, you will not see so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones."


This restriction is probably to slow down the rate at which people turn into bicycles...

The postman, says Sergeant Pluck, is already 71 per cent bicycle... A 38-mile delivery round on a bicycle every day for 40 years. Stands to reason... It's tricky when a miscreant bicycle has to be hanged, though: "Did you ever see a bicycle-shaped coffin?... It is a very intricate piece of wood-working, you would want to be a first-class carpenter to make a good job of the handlebars to say nothing of the pedals and the back-step."

Meanwhile, Inspector O'Corky arrives to announce that the dead body of Mathers has been found. And Sergeant Pluck tells him it's N who is the murderer... He explains: "The Inspector required a captured prisoner as the least tiniest minimum for his inferior bonhomie and mal d'esprit. It was your personal misfortune to be present adjacently at the time but it was likewise my personal good fortune and good luck. There is no option but to stretch you for the serious offence... You can remain in the environs on parole and ticket of leave till we have time to build the high scaffold in the backyard." Scaffolding's expensive these days, though, especially if you want a decent one... And hangings are dependent on good weather: "You would not believe how slippery the rain can make a new scaffold." Ah yes, health and safety...


This article by Michael Foley is illustrated by Irish artist James Kenny. There are some more really cool illustrations from his Third Policeman project here

So, what about those "readings"? Well, they have to do with "omnium". "Some people," MacCruiskeen tells N, "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 and it is always the same." Everything is omnium... "Storm-wind and water and brown bread and the feel of hailstones on the bare head" -- all omnium.

The two policemen take N to visit "eternity". They call it that because there, they say, "you don't grow old". It's accessed via a lift, and its walls can manufacture absolutely anything you want (because of omnium). N puts in his order, and builds up a pile of treasures (including an exterminator, which makes me think of Calvin and Hobbes...). Then he announces he's going to take them with him when he goes. Ah, but no... That's when he's told he can't enter the lift with a greater or lesser weight than he came with... He cries with disappointment. MacCruiskeen offers him a sweet, by way of compensation, but the creams are all stuck together. The two policemen proceed to have a long discussion about the merits of different types of sweet: "If I ate sweets at all," Sergeant Pluck said, "I would live on the 'Carnival Assorted'. Now there is a sweet for you. There is great sucking in them, the flavour is very spiritual and one of them is good for half an hour."

They emerge to find time has not passed...

I hope I've illustrated the absurdist quality of all this. The characters go into things deadpan, accepting as normal the most bizarre circumstances, which are presented as though they make absolute sense.


Kenny's take on MacCruiskeen and the narrator

***

Quickly, the rest: N escapes the scaffold, because the policemen are distracted by dodgy readings. He doesn't dash off, but rather spends the night in the cells. The following morning he finds nearby a very feminine bicycle, "posing there like a mannequin rather than leaning idly like a loafer against the wall, and resting on its prim flawless tyres with irreproachable precision, two tiny points of clean contact with the level floor... I knew that I liked this bicycle more than I had ever liked any other bicycle, better even than I had liked some people with two legs. I liked her unassuming competence, her docility, the simple dignity of her quiet way."

He rides off, only to realize he's riding past the house of old Mathers. Which is where he finds Policeman Fox, the third policeman, who inhabits a police station inside the walls of the house... Why is it there? Ah, that would be because of the rates... "Sixteen and eightpence in the pound with thruppence in the pound for bad yellow water that I would not use and fourpence by your kind leave for technical education. Is it any wonder the country is on its final legs with the farmers crippled...?"

The box that N and Divney stole from old Mathers apparently contains omnium, and Policeman Fox has sent it to N's old house: "You are a lucky man to have it because there is nothing so valuable in the whole world and it works like a charm, you could swear it was a question of clockwork. I weighed it and there is more than four ounces in it, enough to make you a man of private means and anything else you like to fancy."

N reaches his own house. Years have obviously passed since the murder. And Divney collapses with shock: "He sobbed convulsively where he lay and began to cry and mutter things disjointedly like a man raving at the door of death. It was about me. He told me to keep away. He said I was not there. He said I was dead. He said that what he had put under the boards in the big house was not the black box but a mine, a bomb. It had gone up when I touched it. He had watched the bursting of it from where I had left him. The house was blown to bits. I was dead. He screamed to me to keep away. I was dead for sixteen years."

N sets out again, encountering the same landscapes that we saw through his eyes at the beginning of the book, but giving no spark of recognition. He turns a corner, and sees the 2D building. It's the police station, and we're right back to Square 1.

***

It's definitely disconcerting...

I liked Susan Price's characterization: "It is very funny -- and also bizarre, poetic and despairing... This is sinister, eerie, unsettling comedy... [I] was struck by ... how frightening much of it is. I've read ghost stories that don't manage to convey such an sense of menace and ill-omen, as, in a few lines, O'Brien does... This sense of nothing being quite as it should be, of indeterminate dread, pervades the book -- and is part of the very narration, with its cool, detached, measured descriptions of terrors and shocks."

That all sounds very Kafka-like, and Michael Foley expands that point: "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)...

"In Kafka's modern version [of the quest saga] 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... The Third Policeman works similar variations on the mythical structure... 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)."

Then there's de Selby... Asides and lengthy footnotes on this character form a substantial part of the book, and as we go along, we're invited to ponder questions like these: Was de Selby responsible for World War I? Did he really try to dilute water? Could he really not tell the difference between men and women? Is the earth actually shaped like a sausage? It's all done with perfect seriousness, The pseudo-academic language and tone are perfect. In all, it's a wonderful send-up. C.M. Barry gives us a tongue-in-cheek summary of de Selby's life and opus. And Paul Fagan is good on O'Brien's penchant for hoaxes of all descriptions, including an incident "when he (allegedly) fabricated an interview with James Joyce's father... [which] was published as authentic in Maria Jolas's Joyce Yearbook for 1949 -- much to the supposed hoaxer's reported amusement".


Bookshelf at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin. Ronald L. Dotterer: "Flann O'Brien spent his entire literary career in Joyce's shadow... Writing The Dalkey Archive [pictured] became the explicit outlet, and a full-scale purgation of this obsession, for Brian O'Nolan's own understanding of Joyce's influence on his own literary life." Joyce appears as a character in The Dalkey Archive (but wouldn't have read the book, of course, as he was dead already). O'Brien's first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, on the other hand, was probably the last book that Joyce (then almost blind) read for himself

***

Running through all this tricksiness, however, is a movingly lyrical vein. It is hard to deny the sheer beauty of many of the passages. Examples:

-- "I looked away to the window. Night was gone from it without a trace, leaving in substitution a distant hill that lay gently against the sky. Clouds of white and grey pillowed it and on its soft shoulder trees and boulders were put pleasingly to make it true. I could hear a morning wind making its way indomitably throughout the world and all the low unsilence of the daytime was in my ear, bright and restless like a caged bird."

-- "Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day – mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely."

***

Nigel and I rarely read the same books. And yet it turned out that he'd read this, at least twice. The first time round, it was recommended by an enthusiast who sounds as evangelical as Clare Moriarty... When I mentioned the title, he immediately asked, "Is it about a bicycle?"

I would very much like to revisit this book, preferably in an audio-version. Would they read out the footnotes, I wonder...


There are 188 references to bicycles in this novel...