Salient

Neglected Masterpieces

By BK Drinkwater | 19 May, 2008

The Third Policeman
Flann O’Brien

Brian O’Nolan’s job prevented him from writing under his own name, so over the course of hundreds of newspaper columns and God only knows how many letters to the editor of The Irish Times, he wrote under noms de plume. In fact, he wrote under so many different names that there’s probably a rather tedious thesis in trying to pin them all down. Of these manifold monikers, Flann O’Brien was reserved for his five novels, and of these five, The Third Policeman is the best.

O’Brien’s involutory debut, At-Swim-Two-Birds, was more popular with writers and academics than with his publishers, who thought it a bit much “fantastic” and bit little profitable. So when O’Brien rocked on up with The Third Policeman, they balked on the (inane) grounds that it was too much fantastic. And it was thus that one of the finest comic novels written in English languished as typescript in a locked drawer for twenty-seven years, waiting for the spectacularly alcoholic author’s death to be published. Some of the more hopeless romantics in lit-crit circles have suggested that the unprinted masterpiece drove O’Nolan to drink; I believe he drank because he was a drunk, but who the hell am I to get in the way of a nice story? Or a tragic one, for that matter.

The novel starts with a surrealist’s homage to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unnamed narrator grows up to become obsessed with the works of an obscure philosopherscientist called De Selby (whose bickering commentators are featured throughout in footnotes that constitute a comic masterpiece in their own right), and this obsession leads him to murder. What follows is a fable of guilt. The narrator is doomed to wander a strange county with a strange twodimensional police station populated by two even stranger cops (and a bicycle) through a sequence of events that defy synopsis. All the while, the penumbral third policeman looms: an instrument of divine wrath or a murdered man’s tenant, depending on how you look at him. And all of this is very funny.

The Third Policeman was featured in the TV show Lost, which brought about an increase in sales to complement the modest increase in academic attention the book’s received over the last decade and a bit. This is a good thing. Let me be clear: this is a novel you should have on your shelf. If you don’t believe me, find a copy and read the opening line. You’ll believe me then.