The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Murderer Adrift in a Dantean Irish Wonderland The narrator of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1940/1967) begins his story, "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade." The first chapter then relates how the narrator was abandoned and orphaned as a boy, educated at a good boarding school where he fell in love with the work of the physicist/philosopher/psychologist de Selby, graduated and lost his leg and gained a wooden one, came home to find John Divney running the family farm and pub, spent all his time and money on English, French, and German commentaries on his hero de Selby, and finally agreed to help Divney murder Mathers to get enough money to publish a "definitive" annotated de Selby index. For three years after the murder the narrator never let Divney out of his sight for fear that his "friend" would abscond with their victim's money, until Divney has the narrator go to the old man's house to retrieve the black cash box hidden under the floorboards there. But when the narrator reaches under the floorboards, he experiences an "ineffable" fugue, after which he finds that the cash box (which he saw a moment earlier) is actually absent, while Mathers is present and sentient. The narrator has forgotten his name (which he has never revealed) and now embarks on an absurd, disturbing, fantastic adventure, ostensibly to locate the cash box. Cries of amazement regularly escape his lips. He wonders if he "was dreaming or in the grip of some hallucination." Has he entered an Irish Wonderland, Heaven, or Hell? Are the bicycle-obsessed policemen there eccentrics, angels, or devils? The surreal situations are coherent and logical in a way worthy of Lewis Carroll. Sergeant Pluck, for example, explains that, due to "the Atomic Theory," by which atoms are "as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jig on top of a tombstone," people who ride bicycles exchange particles with them, leading to this man being 23% bicycle or that bicycle 78% man, and so on. Did you never notice that bicycles often don't end up right where you left them? (Thus Pluck locks his bicycle in the solitary confinement cell.) Best not to ponder what happens when a man rides a woman's bicycle or vice versa! Then there is the creative second policeman MacCruiskeen who plays a musical instrument whose notes are so high they are inaudible and displays a series of inter-nested chests ending in ones so small they are invisible. As for the crazy, third policeman, Fox, out on patrol for 25 years, the less said the better. Meanwhile, the beginnings of the 12 chapters of the novel teem with footnotes relating to the theories, experiments, and writings of the narrator's crackpot idol de Selby as they prefigure the coming action of the chapters with topics like water, sleep, time, direction, roads, names, houses, and mirrors. The footnotes also mediate between de Selby commentators, like the two trusted experts, Hatchjaw and Bassett, and the "shadowy" Kraus and the "egregious" du Garbandier, some of whom may be pseudonyms or imposters, all of whom disagree on nearly everything. Isn't academia is prey to rivalries, forgeries, and unworthy subjects of study! This opposing mirror infinity is a motif in the novel: footnotes inside footnotes, scholars inside scholars, codices inside codices, chests inside chests, rooms inside rooms, bodies inside bodies. . . It is vertiginous. The narrator is odd. He is both honest and unreliable. We believe what he says, but note much that he leaves unsaid (like just what happened to his leg). After saying early on that he committed his "greatest sin" for de Selby, the narrator seems free from remorse for helping to murder an old man. He is both gullible and canny about "friend" Divney, knowing that the freeloader has been robbing their customers and him but letting himself get talked into killing Mathers for money and then refusing to be separated from Divney until the money has been divided. The narrator is not as bad as Divney, yet he is self-centered, as in his materialistic wants in "Eternity" and his big plans for "his" omnium (the essential divine building block of everything). All of the above is written by O'Brien with great humor, preventing things from getting too bleak, bizarre, or dry. The scenes where Pluck lists a series of names to see if one might be the narrator's, or a rescue company of one-legged men disguise their number, or the news that Hatchjaw was arrested in Europe for impersonating himself, or the explanation for how unerringly Pluck is able to locate a stolen bicycle, or Mathers' reason for saying no to every request, or the narrator's conversations with his soul ("Joe"), all these and many more are very funny. Another saving grace of the nightmare is the frequently lyrical, pastoral beauty. "Birds were audible in the secrecy of the bigger trees, changing branches and conversing not tumultuously. In a field by the road a donkey stood quietly, as if he were examining the morning, bit by bit, unhurryingly… as if he understood completely these unexplainable enjoyments of the world." But O'Brien is also a master of the disturbing detail, as of the police barracks: "I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning to the remainder." Audiobook reader Jim Norton gives a marvelous reading of the novel. His Irish accent ranges from the slight and educated (the narrator) to the broad and working class (Sergeant Pluck). He's also an uncanny uptight pompous British scholar, a nasal dead old man, and an italics-voiced soul. He reads every word and pause with perfect intention and understanding. If you'd like a richly written unique book with flavors of Waiting for Godot, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Divine Comedy, and the old Prisoner TV show, you should read The Third Policeman. View all my reviews
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