The Bastard Love-Child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses

Just a quick question for the literate public - why haven’t you read The Third Policeman yet? If you have, then congratulations, you get to stand with me and harass everyone else. As for the rest of you, what’s taking you so long?

I’ll give you the benefit of ignorance and assume that it has simply passed you by. I suppose that’s understandable. Brian O’Nolan, AKA Myles NaGopaleen, AKA Flann O’Brien is the shrinking violet of Irish literature. If he were a film, he’d be Falling Down, that Michael Douglas film which nobody remembers even though it was awesome. Although he is often overlooked, no one can deny that Flann O’Brien belongs around the top of the list, not far from Joyce himself.

His writing style is playful and drunken. He was a man who, with his associates, the likes of Kavanagh and Behan, defined the stereotype of the drunken Irish writer. Whatever sense his books lack is compensated tenfold by a natural humour that allows you to suspend your disbelief just long enough to get to the next volley of lunacy.

Published posthumously in 1967, The Third Policeman centres around the unnamed narrator whose life takes a dramatic turn for the weird when he goes to retrieve Mathers’ box. He finds himself in a strange little plot of nowhere in which he comes across a ‘completely false and unconvincing’ police station. Here we meet two of the three policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Sergeant McCruiskeen, two men of the law more than happy to solve any crime as long as it is related to bicycles.

The story then meanders disconnectedly along a ludicrous journey that can only be compared to the bastard love-child of Alice in Wonderland and Ulysses. We find a spear so sharp that it can cut you before it even touches you and a carved wooden chest with an infinite number of smaller wooden chests resting inside each other and some strange element called ‘omnium’.

Just when things look irreconcilably daft, Flann delivers a delicious little twist which, although a tad predictable by today’s standards, still offers enough satisfaction to pay off the preceding debt of confusion.

Just to be even more mental, the main text is periodically interrupted by footnotes regarding the work of DeSelby, a fictional mad scientist. Some of these footnotes are so long as to spill into two or three pages, thereby overshadowing the main story. Scholars often question the significance of this practice - I think Brian O’Nolan just got a kick out of making people squint for longer than necessary.

The main talent in the Third Policeman is it’s humour. The author was a prodigy of the pun and if you like to laugh, this is the book for you, but be warned - this laughter isn’t free. The price for a chuckle is a chill. Funny though this book is, it’s undeniably creepy. Every scene is edged with the blur of uncertainty like a dream that explains the meaning of everything for a split second before you wake up.

If it were adapted for the screen, there would be no end to the difficulties that would arise in portraying something that is intrinsically impossible.

And there are plenty of those.

You want an example?

How about Sergeant Pluck’s Atomic Theory of the Bicycle?

It goes like this - there’s a great danger to be had with the riding of bicycles. On a bumpy road, the seat of the bike makes an untold number of collisions with the person riding it. Over time, bicycle-atoms are transferred into the person and human-atoms are likewise transferred into the bike. This results in some very bicycline humans (who have trouble standing still without falling over) and some very human bicycles (who are prone to raiding the scullery).

Of course, Flann O’Brien says it better than me.