Crom Your Enthusiasm (11)

By: Robert Wringham
August 13, 2015

One of 25 installments in a series of posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite fantasy novels from the Thirties (1934–1943). Enjoy!

THE THIRD POLICEMAN | FLANN O’BRIEN | w. 1939–40

Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman — likely his masterpiece but not published in his lifetime — coils around on itself like the mainspring in an intricate timepiece, but one in which the usual laws of time and motion don’t apply. The book is bonkers. It gives us a narrator whose name is unknown but whose soul is called “Joe”; two policemen who speak in riddles and nonsense in a “completely false and unconvincing” police station; and a man who gradually swaps places with his bicycle, exchanging atoms as he rides. Oh, and it’s set in rural Ireland with all the requisite blarney.

The novel begins strangely but at least cohesively with our narrator caught up in a murder plot: he and a cohort put paid to a wealthier man so they might pilfer his fabled cash box. When the box is eventually located, however, “something happens” and, with the universe folding in on itself, the real story begins. Our narrator slips into parallel-sideways-afterlife world, the precise nature of which is never quite explained but is constructed from elements of the “murder plot” Ireland we’ve left behind.

The Third Policeman is a philosophical novel in the line of Sartre’s Nausea, but the elements of heroic fantasy are here too. There’s a hero in the narrator; villains everywhere, but especially in policemen (the useless two but also the scarier third, a powerful demon-type called Fox); and a sought-after object in the form of the cash box, itself containing the mythical element “omnium,” capable of giving the bearer anything he desires.

With its internal logic and copious footnotes to fictional scholarship, The Third Policeman is so high as literature that it goes all the way around and comes up through the bottom again. If you knew nothing of Flann O’Brien it’d be hard to know whether the book was written by a pioneer academic operating on the far side of knowledge or a lunatic ten-year-old who was never told about gravity. It also inspired parts of TV’s Lost (when it was suggested as a possible key to Lost’s plot, the publisher was taken by surprise and had to order a reprint) but don’t let that put you off.

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CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2015): Erik Davis on Jack Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK | Sara Ryan on T.H. White’s THE SWORD IN THE STONE | Mark Kingwell on C.S. Lewis’s OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET | David Smay on Fritz Leiber’s THIEVES’ HOUSE | Natalie Zutter on Robert E. Howard’s QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST | James Parker on J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT | Adrienne Crew on Dion Fortune’s THE SEA PRIESTESS | Gabriel Boyer on Clark Ashton Smith’s ZOTHIQUE stories | John Hilgart on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD | Barbara Bogaev on William Sloane’s TO WALK THE NIGHT | Rob Wringham on Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN | Dan Fox on Hergé’s THE SEVEN CRYSTAL BALLS | Flourish Klink on C.S. Lewis’s PERELANDRA | Tor Aarestad on L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s THE ROARING TRUMPET | Anthony Miller on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH | Suzanne Fischer on E.R. Eddison’s MISTRESS OF MISTRESSES | Molly Sauter on Herbert Read’s THE GREEN CHILD | Diana Leto on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s TARZAN AND THE LION MAN | Joshua Glenn on Robert E. Howard’s THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON | Andrew Hultkrans on H.P. Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS | Lynn Peril on Fritz Leiber’s CONJURE WIFE | Gordon Dahlquist on H.P. Lovecraft’s THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME | Adam McGovern on C.L. Moore’s JIREL OF JOIRY stories | Tom Nealon on Fritz Leiber’s TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE | John Holbo on Robert E. Howard’s CONAN MYTHOS.

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Crom Your Enthusiasm (11)

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