Original Book Cover
Amy has a new favorite literature website: Bookslut (www.bookslut.com)
[Isn't that a great name?]
“Bookslut is a monthly web magazine and daily blog dedicated to those who love to read. We provide a constant supply of news, reviews, commentary, insight, and more than occasional opinions.”
I highly recommend it. Also, check out Bookslut’s ComicbookSlut Column!
After poking all over the web, it was Bookslut that finally shed some light on this month’s WRLB/Bookclub selection: The Third Policeman (1967) by Flann O’Brien. Well, kinda.
O’Brien, an Irish “humorist,” actually finished writing The Third Policeman somewhere around 1940. It was turned down by publishers, and O’Brien claimed he lost the manuscript. [Truth is, it sat on a table in his house for 20 years without him noticing it.] It was finally published a year after his death.
I’ve only ever read O’Brien’s first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds. The only thing I can remember about it is that it was completely confusing when it was supposed to be funny.
Keep that in mind as you’re reading this month: The Third Policeman is supposed to be FUNNY.
From “The Third Policeman” – Review by Randy Schaub
“In The Third Policeman, our hero and narrator, a nameless young man with a wooden leg, assists in a money-motivated killing, and, after trying to retrieve the stashed goods some time later, passes into a strange otherness — a place that superficially resembles the Irish countryside, but which casually disobeys the normal laws of How Things Work. He encounters a small building of impermanent and shifting geometry which turns out to be the local barracks — it is here that he meets the policemen. The novel has that special quality — the fantastic made believable, yet retaining its power to amaze — that is the hallmark of authors like Borges, Kafka, or Barthelme. The events are alternately frightening, baffling, and hilarious, and are brought into three dimensions by perfect, musical prose.”
“The main of the book is devoted to the solution of our young hero’s mystery, and to the further mystery of the bizarre policemen which populate the world he has wandered into. The policemen speak in an infectious, over-wrought dialogue that you’ll have to take care not to pick up yourself. They invent devices that turn noise into electricity. They take gauge readings in a subterranean, industrial version of eternity. I don’t want to delve too far into this storyline, rather I urge you to discover it for yourself. You’ll never ride a bicycle again.”
INTERESTING TO NOTE: This book FITS into the trippy psychedelic world of experimentation even though it was written in 1940 — an entirely different world from that discussed in our recent WRLB selections, Lord of the Flies and Slaughterhouse-Five, where post WWII horror and despair dominate even the silliest of moments.
Instead, O’Brien sticks to satire or dark humor to portray the human condition. A nameless man meets his fate, and guess what? It doesn’t make much sense to him [or us].
The very best discussion I could find online comes from an interview NPR did with Charles Baxter [A professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota].
[This interview, btw, is a PERFECT example of Why Amy Did Not Try To Become A Professor Of Creative Writing Reason #2.]
Excerpt from “The Funniest, and Scariest Book Ever Written,” August 22, 2006 at www.npr.org.
Q. Donoghue [another critic] also makes the case that O’Brien is a “nihilist” writer, another claim that strikes me as overblown [uh, another critic these guys don't like very much]. Isn’t the narrator actually being punished — albeit in hilariously [hilariously?] roundabout fashion — for his misdeeds?
No, it’s not nihilism. What confuses some readers is that the tone of this novel is not moralistic, or earnest, but slippery and weirdly offhanded. In it, language is like a fish you’ve caught that has slipped out of your hands and is flopping around in the boat. We’re plunged into a comic nightmare, where language, like that fish I mentioned, keeps going out of control or manages to flop out of the boat back into its native element. (English was the second language that O’Brien acquired, and it must have felt slightly alien to him, as it did to many Irish writers, because he loves to mock its technical vocabulary and its rumbling blowhard sentences.) [Raise yer hand if you think O'Brien might have been making fun of some OTHER type of blowhard.]
The narrator — who is a murderer — ends up confronting his victim in the afterlife in a funny but also terrifying scene, and he watches as, slowly but surely, a scaffold is built for his own hanging — or his “stretching,” as the policemen call it. The narrator meets his soul, and as the novel advances, he feels a growing sense of disorientation and “brain-shrinking” fright. He learns that in the world of eternity, you can see treasures but can’t enrich yourself with them. This is nihilism? It’s the opposite — a world supersaturated with meanings and consequences.
Q. [I'm] Right — and isn’t there at least some significance in O’Brien making such sport of the hilariously mechanistic philosophy of de Selby? It does, after all, furnish the narrator’s motive for the murder.
I think the narrator is in love with the wisdom of de Selby the way the man on the American street might love the wisdom of, oh, say, L. Ron Hubbard [HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!]. The narrator’s obsession with de Selby’s “writings” starts to seem almost sensible after a while. De Selby believes, for instance, that the darkness of “night” is created by an accumulation of soot produced by industrial effluvia, and that “sleep” is actually a form of hysterical fainting required by the body because of the lack of oxygen caused by all this soot. This explanation sounds relatively sensible to me, particularly in cities like Cleveland [Awwww --- come on! What you got against Cleveland?].
And why isn’t it true, as the novel claims, that, when you hit a piece of steel with a hammer, some of the atoms of the hammer go into the piece of steel? Why shouldn’t people turn into the bicycles they ride? Anyway, no institutionalized form of wisdom or knowledge is left unscathed by this book. I don’t think the mechanism of the cracked world view helps to cause the murder; it’s not the world view, I mean: it’s the obsession. Show me an obsessive, and I’ll show you a potential criminal — or so says this novel [Ahhhh -- the swallow the river water -- er -- Koolaid syndrome]
Q. Any idea of what role Fox [!?!], the actual third policeman, is doing in the book named for him? Is he some sort of gatekeeper for O’Brien’s cracked moral cosmos? Or is he yet another wrong variation on the book’s seemingly endless collection of wrong themes? [????]
I feel as if I have a very loose grip on who this Fox is, a very loose grip indeed. He is apparently a gatekeeper of some kind, or perhaps yet another one of the semi-human objects that the narrator must get around, or over, in his post-mortal confrontation with himself.
If I possessed a symbolizing mentality, which (the gods be praised) I do not [gods be praised, indeed], I would notice that there are three policemen in the story, figures of omnivorous authority [authority that eats veggies and meat?] available here and there to the narrator in the afterlife in which he finds himself. In the Catholicism in which the author, Flann O’Brien, grew up, there is the doctrinal mystery of the Trinity — but fortunately I am not a symbol-making fellow, just a plain reader [HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Yeah, RIGHT!], so there is no possible way that Fox could be a symbol for really much of anything, least of all any entity human or divine that I can think of right now. Of the making of symbols there is no end. Perhaps, after all, the process of symbol-making is like the creation of smaller and smaller chests, treasure chests that are filled, unfortunately, with nothing but smaller treasure chests, which themselves are filled with other chests — did I mention that one of the policemen is making such chests, the smallest one so small that it cannot, apparently, be seen? I didn’t? Good. Such is the logic of this book. [I don't even know where to begin to make fun of this last bit.]
Q. You’ve probably heard that the book made a cameo appearance on the ABC castaway melodrama Lost [Castaway melodrama?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!]. Any theories about the supersaturated meaning of that?
I myself have never seen Lost. However, when Tony Soprano had his near-death experience and, on the other side, found himself in a sort of afterlife standing outside a large multi-roomed house wherein his murder victims lived (with a lighthouse in the distance), I fully expected him to find, somewhere on the doorstep, a copy of The Third Policeman. I can’t imagine why David Chase didn’t think of it. If he didn’t, he should have. That scene felt like something out of O’Brien’s novel. As did that old Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner, which has probably been ripped off for Lost [OMFG].
[Don't you love that? "Shame, SHAME on David Chase for missing a perfectly good sub-reference opportunity! Bad postmodernist! Very bad postmodernist!" This guy basically said: Maybe David Chase was just getting "lazy" at that point and just didn't care. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!! Also "ripped off" is slang for "transformed" or "translated," which seems pretty applicable in both cases -- without the snooty connotation as it were.]
End excerpt [gods be praised!].
So, lovely LOST readers, what are we to think? If “a writer” included this book for “a specific reason,” what on Earth could it be? [Besides a rip off, I mean, of course. snerk].
No matter how effed up the writing or storyline might be, this novel presents us with several promising elements: atonement, fate, DREAM WORLD, circular logic, farcical physicists, obsession and journey to “self.” My advice: Have FUN with it! Take your time and post comments often.
Good luck!
[And don't forget about the bicycle.]
