The Third Policeman
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| Author | Flann O'Brien |
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| Country | Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | humour, philosophical novel |
| Publisher | MacGibbon & Kee Ltd |
| Released | 1967 |
| Pages | 200 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-246-10771-5 |
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's second novel, written in 1939 and 1940 but not published until 1967, after the author's death.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
The unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman is a student of a scientist/philosopher named de Selby, and, as is revealed in the opening paragraph of the novel, has committed a robbery and a violent murder. The narrator seeks a black box belonging to his victim, believing it to contain money that he will use to finance the writing and publication of the definitive critical work on de Selby. The black box was carried by the victim, yet was hidden immediately by his accomplice, John Divney. The narrator refuses to allow his accomplice out of his sight for months, until John Divney believes that it is now safe. John tells him where the box is hidden, and asks him to retrieve the box for him. From the point at which the narrator reaches for the box, the setting, an Irish country parish, begins to become increasingly unfamiliar and out of proportion through the course of the novel. At the suggestion of the man he has killed, the narrator finds a police barracks, hoping to enlist the policemen into locating the black box for him. There he meets two of the three policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Policeman MacCruiskeen, who speak in a curious mélange of spoonerisms, solecisms, and malapropisms; and there he is introduced to various peculiar or irrational concepts, artifacts, and locations, including a contraption that collects sound and converts it to light, a vast underground chamber called 'Eternity,' an intricate carved chest containing an infinite series of identical but smaller chests, and a theory of the transfer of atoms between a man and his bicycle:
| The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles. |
It is later discovered that the man the narrator killed has been found dead, and the narrator is blamed because he is the most convenient suspect. He faces the gallows, but escapes with the help of a beautiful bicycle. He escapes to the house his accomplice, John Divney and he once inhabited, to find his accomplice twenty years older with a wife and children. When John sees the narrator, he has a heart attack and dies shouting that the narrator was supposed to be dead, for the black box was not filled with money but a bomb.
The narrator runs off, and is soon accompanied by John Divney. They walk down the road, and come to the police barracks. It is then obvious that the narrator, and now John Divney, are in a surreal afterlife, and go through the same series of events without remembering any of it.
Other odd characters found in the novel include the narrator's soul, named Joe, and Martin Finnucane, a one-legged bandit.
[edit] Devices
- The character of de Selby never appears in the book, but he is mentioned frequently by the narrator as an inspirational source. Contributing to the absurd setting of the book, de Selby's theories, such as the belief that nighttime is a result of the accretion of "black air", become more and more outlandish. In addition, the narrator and footnotes expose more and more of de Selby's personal idiosyncrasies, such as his inability to tell the difference between men and women.
- The aforementioned footnotes are mostly a series of discussions of de Selby's various critics. At times these footnotes disruptively span several pages and threaten to overtake the novel's primary storyline while at the same time seeming to influence the setting and action of the novel, giving credence to critical claims that the novel can be regarded as a work of metafiction that prefigures later trends in postmodern fiction, or at the least a satirical and parodical take on rationalism and academic language.
- The circular, self-referential nature of the book is evident from the ending; the storyline gradually brings the reader to the point where the book starts, and the last few paragraphs echo the opening.
[edit] References
The book's influences (or targets of satire) are thought by critics such as Keith Hopper to include such diverse subjects as Einstein's theory of relativity, the mystic-scientific works of J.W. Dunne, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Cartesian dualism, J.K. Huysmans's decadent novel À Rebours, and John Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World.
[edit] Publication history
In 1940, O'Brien submitted the manuscript for The Third Policeman to Longman's, the English publisher of his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, but they declined to publish: "We realize," read the rejection notice, "the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so." The American author William Saroyan, who had become acquainted with O'Brien during a brief stay in Dublin, offered the use of his literary agent in finding an American publisher, but this too was an unsuccessful effort. Deeply discouraged, O'Brien made no further attempts at publication, and shelved the manuscript, claiming that it had been lost. He would later cannibalize elements of The Third Policeman for use in The Dalkey Archive, published in 1964 and generally agreed to be an inferior work. A year after O'Brien's death, it was finally published by Timothy O'Keeffe, the Irish-born publisher who at the time headed up his own publishing company, Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe; had it not been for O'Keeffe's determined efforts, the work would be unknown today. The Third Policeman is now regarded as a masterpiece, and its posthumous publication tragic.
[edit] O'Brien's opinion
In a letter to William Saroyan, dated 14 February 1940, O'Brien explained the strange plot of The Third Policeman:
- ... When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he's a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing ... It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever ... When you are writing about the world of the dead – and the damned – where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny cracks.
In an oft-quoted passage that was omitted from the published novel, O'Brien wrote:
- Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.
Hell Goes Round and Round was in fact a working title for the novel.
[edit] References in popular culture
The novel was featured in the October 5, 2005 episode of the hit television series Lost. At one point during the episode (entitled "Orientation"), a copy of the book can be seen. The episode concerns the main characters' discovery of a mechanism which they are told must be reset at every 108 minutes by entering the numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42), or else "the world will be destroyed." The series' creators have said that anyone who has read the book "will have a lot more ammunition when dissecting plotlines" of the show. The book has seen a significant sales increase since its role in Lost.
Django Bates released an album entitled Music for the Third Policeman in 1990, which was voted one of the best albums of the year by The Guardian and by Q magazine.
The fantasy author Robert Rankin is heavily influenced by O'Brien's work, and the concept of the bicycle taking on human characteristics is a recurring device used in his Brentford Trilogy. He admits within the text of the novel itself that he took this idea from The Third Policeman.
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mentions the police barracks from The Third Policeman as an example of a paranormal phenomenon in Ireland.
In a bump aired on June 5, 2006, Adult Swim suggested that viewers without a computer read The Third Policeman.
At the end of episode 12 of Cartoon Network's Minoriteam, titled "The Internet", the White Shadow is seen reading a copy of "The Third Policeman" before launching into a fireside chat.
[edit] Further reading
- Cronin, Anthony. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien. Grafton Books (1989).
- Hopper, Keith. Flann O'Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist. Cork University Press (1995).
- Kenner, Hugh. A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. Alfred A. Knopf (1983).
