The Third Policeman

 

Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman (1940)

I've been aware of this one for a while but couldn't quite get past descriptions promising a comedy set in Ireland involving policemen. I've already read Puckoon and it wasn't that great.

Thankfully it turns out to be a comedy in the sense of Gulliver's Travels rather than Are You Being Served? and is both fairly dark and massively fucking strange. More than anything, I'd describe it as a surrealist novel given the peculiar, slightly disturbing atmosphere derived from our man inhabiting a world where the laws of physics work by the logic of dreams. Specifically, if you've ever had one of those dreams wherein you realise you know how to fly or to work some otherwise superhuman power, but you know it's a dream so you have to tell yourself to remember exactly what to do so that you'll be able to do it when you wake up - and of course you always forget - well, The Third Policeman feels very much like one of those; so I suppose we're talking the general vicinity of Beckett.

Additionally, The Third Policeman approximately constitutes Menippean satire, and although it thankfully never quite becomes fully aware of its being a novel - which has become something of an overused trope, I feel - most other signifiers of the form are here, notably the book within the book - in this case the works of de Selby, a pseudo-philosopher who believes that, amongst other things, night is caused by an accumulation of dark air rather than the occlusion of sunlight. Quite a page count is used up in discussion of de Selby's crackpot ideas, many of which seem to echo those of Charles Fort, funnily enough, to the point of later chapters being squeezed up to the top of the page by lengthy footnotes concerning the man's imaginary works. The point of this specific focus is oblique but works because it seems to describe the nightmarish world inhabited by our unnamed narrator. Among de Selby's ideas we find, for example, that a person who rides a bicycle every day will eventually become part bicycle due to an exchange of atomic material between rider and transport, and so the bicycle itself will become partially human; which is explained with a straight face and thus maintains the integrity of the novel as a whole, as distinct from turning it into some awful Douglas Adams gag-fest. So it's funny, but you don't have to laugh if it seems inappropriate, as it most probably will.

The scene was real and incontrovertible and at variance with the talk of the Sergeant, but I knew that the Sergeant was talking the truth and if it was a question of taking my choice, it was possible that I would have to forego the reality of all the simple things my eyes were looking at.

Roughly speaking, we seem once again to be mapping the space between objective and subjective reality, which is possibly why so many of de Selby's peculiar ruminations seem to hint at the weirder findings of quantum theory - unless it's just me - as well as the aforementioned Fort. I can perhaps see why O'Brien claimed to have lost the manuscript when it failed to find a publisher back in the forties being as it sags a little in the middle, apparently spending an eternity in the police station - although that may well have been the point - but its growing reputation seems otherwise deserved.