Guest review by Susan Price: THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien

"Blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it." 

Susan Price has written everything from picture book texts to ‘cross-over’ novels like The Sterkarm Handshake, which won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award but is read by teenagers and adults alike. Her book The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal. She is one of the bloggers at Authors Electric. Susan Price’s website is here.

“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.

"I was born a long time ago…”

That’s the opening of The Third Policeman,  and it contains a psychology of psychopathy. The cool, unemotional account of a violent murder. The ranking of murder as equal in importance to the manufacture of a bicycle-pump, and the instant shifting of blame.

Flann O’ Brien is known as a ‘comic writer.’ This is a ‘comic novel.’ It’s also a masterpiece.

It is very funny — and also bizarre, poetic and despairing. It’s sinister. This is sinister, eerie, unsettling comedy.

I first read The Third Policeman thirty years ago, and on re-reading, I find I remembered the comic scenes most: the atomic theory, as applied to bicycles and Irish roads; the men who are more than 75% bicycle; the delicate legal matter of deciding, when a man who is predominately bicycle, commits a murder, which should be hung? The man or the bicycle?

I remembered the book as much more light-hearted than, on re-reading, it actually is. Scathingly funny, yes. Comic in the sense of ‘holding human nature up to ridicule.’ In its inventiveness and originality, it's even playful. But light-hearted? No.

On second-reading, I still laughed at the scenes set in the police station — O’Brien’s inventiveness and verbal audacity is second to none — but was more struck by the poetry of many passages, and how frightening much of it is. I’ve read whole ghost stories that don’t manage to convey such a sense of menace and ill-omen, as, in a few lines, O’Brien does.

The prose is beautiful. O'Brien could move, with ease and perfect rhythm, often in the same passage, from the cant of the pub, to officialise, to poetry.

As I read, certain images kept coming into my mind, all drawn from ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ with its strange, skewed perspectives.

“As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked as if it would not deceive a child… What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply rooted in my mind that this was the house I was searching for… 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 in the remainder. The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had encountered since I had seen the old man in the chair and I felt afraid of it.”

'My gaze faltered about the thing...' What a phrase.

This sense of nothing being 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.

The nameless narrator, who tells us he can’t remember his own name, is an orphan and, due to an accident, has a wooden leg. He has inherited a fortune, but by the time he is adult and returns to his farm, the money has been squandered by the caretaker, John Divney.

Both the narrator and Divney are keen to replenish the fortune — Divney so he can marry, and the narrator so he can publish a book on the scientist, De Selby, with whom he has become obsessed.

Asides and footnotes on De Selby make up a substantial part of the book, adding both to its oddness and its cool, detached manner. Among De Selby’s theories is the notion that darkness is a contaminating vapour which emanates from holes in the earth, and contributes to disease because we inhale it. This was once a genuinely held theory of the nature of darkness, before it was established that darkness is an absence of light, rather than a thing in itself.

De Selby also argues that if we angle enough mirrors, to give enough successive reflections of ourselves, we could look into our past. He claims, by setting up many mirrors, to have glimpsed himself at the age of eleven. Many of his theories seem to be twisted, or over-literal understandings of relativity or quantum theory, while their twisting of time and space relate to the literally twisted perspective in the description of the book’s world.

In pursuit of fortune, the narrator and Divney murder an old man, Mathers. Divney makes off with the cash-box, which he hides, saying they must spend none of the money until suspicion has died down.

Eventually, Divney reveals that he has hidden the box in Mather’s house. They go together, one night, to the deserted half-ruinous murder house, and while Divney waits outside, the narrator goes in to fetch the box. From this moment on, the book, already strange, becomes increasingly bizarre. The narrator climbs through a window:-

“I clambered through the opening and found myself, not at once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen. When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me.”

He discovers that the cash-box has gone. And then:—

“I heard a cough behind me, soft, and natural yet more disturbing than any sound that could come upon the human ear. That I did not die of fright was due to two things, the fact that my senses were already disarranged and also that…the cough seemed to bring with it some more awful alteration in everything, just as if it had held the universe standstill for an instant…”

The narrator then takes tea with the old man he has murdered.

I don’t want to spoil the book by detailing the narrator’s adventures after that. Suffice to say that he meets with two enormous policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Constable MacCruiskeen, and also with his own soul. We learn about MacCruiskeen’s mind-boggling hobbies, and even more about De Selby’s experiments. We meet the brotherhood of one-legged men, visit Eternity and, eventually, meet the third policeman, Sergeant Fox.

If the book has a message, I understand it to be that Evil is self-centred, self-aggrandising, futile and barren. And, possibly, that to be such a person is its own punishment, though they will never understand that.

In fact, a lack of understanding is one of the book’s themes. The narrator obsessively studies the works of De Selby, trying to understand them — but his understanding of the world around him seems to dwindle as his knowledge of De Selby increases.

The Third Policeman is a book that blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it — except those others by Flann O’Brien, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan.

His first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds (also a must-read) was published, and acclaimed, in 1939.

The Third Policeman was his second novel, and it was turned down. It wasn’t published until 1967, after the author’s death, when it was recognised for the wonderful piece of writing it is.

I wonder if, these days, any conventional publisher would accept it at all?

The Third Policeman is published by Dalkey Archive Press