Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In August we will be reading The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien for our Sci-Fi & Fantasy category - who's in?

Already on it as my library app had an audiobook available. It's......I have no idea what this is to be honest! :D

I picked this up thinking “oh a quick, comic read” and didn’t quite get what I was expecting....I’m just over halfway through and have had some smiley moments but it’s like reading Pale Fire; every couple of chapters or so I have to put it down and go do something else to process what I can of it.
I’m really interested to hear about the audio version of this. Firstly I need to know if the narrator is Irish and secondly if you are having to skip back now and again to cement things?

I have owned this book for a long time as generally very keen on this author so I’m in.

Fay, the narrator is indeed Irish, I doubt I would have continued listening if he wasn't! Looks like he's also done some of James Joyce's works. Narration is very good and think adds a bit to the comedic feel.

Do I need to pause and rewind... Yep! Especially if I'm listening after a day at work when brain is a bit frazzled.

I just got this quote from page 164 (in my version) which sums up my reading experience so far “I had heard the Sergeant’s words and understood them thoroughly but they were no more significant than the clear sounds that infest the air at all times”

I’m four chapters in. This is such a strange book. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s funny and I like it. I’m just suspending belief and going with the flow and accepting all the weird theories and absurd situations. O’Brien was Irish and alcoholic and the imaginative and incredible writing seems to me possibly the product of a mind under influence of alcohol and rebelling against the rigidities of society.

If you’re reading the version with an introduction by Denis Donoghue, there’s a major spoiler in the introduction! If you don’t want to be spoiled, just read the first two pages of the introduction and skip the rest.

Started this last night and got a few chapters in. Strange, but so far I’m enjoying it a lot more than At Swim Two-Birds

The book was enjoyable but didn’t make much sense to me until I reached the end. Then I realised what the point of the book is – or so I think. I believe several of the strange theories are satirical, but there’s still a lot that I’m not sure how to interpret. I’m looking forward to seeing what meaning people make of this book when they’re done with it.

Maggie wrote: "I’m four chapters in. This is such a strange book. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s funny and I like it. I’m just suspending belief and going with the flow and accepting all the weird theories..."

That is my main impression of it - weird but interesting. It has been 7 years since I read it so perhaps I should revisit in order to be able to participate in this discussion...

Finished this evening--I don't know that I have anything cogent to say about it, but I thought it was funny. Maybe droll is a better word, but it had me chuckling throughout. I gave it one of my few five-stars. I was really nervous about reading this, given how little At Swim Two-Birds resonated. Now I'm thinking about trying ASTB again, just to see if it was a case of wrong book/wrong time.

Bryan - think of At Swim Two Birds as O'Brien's Ulysses and The Third Policeman as his Finnegans Wake :D

I don't know if that helps!

Before I post my review, I thought I'd add my story about this novel (which you might well already know and I think it now gets mentioned in modern editions. O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) was in his mid-twenties and employed at a highish level in the Irish civil service when he wrote his debut novel "At Swim-Two-Birds". It was taken up by Heinnemen on the back of a hugely favourable review by head reader Graham Greene. In 1940 it was printed, advance copies were sent out - gushing reviews came back for press use by Dylan Thomas and others, a few copies were sent to book shops and then the london warehouse housing most copies of ASTB was bombed in the blitz and mostly destroyed.

Heinneman asked for a second novel, not wanting to risk reprinting a debut novel amid paper-rationing in wartime, but could they have something a little less strange. O'Brien said, "I have just the thing for you, I've been working on a little murder mystery, it's called The Third Policeman". He sent it to them and they rejected it. O'Brien was so upset he put it in a drawer and told his friends that the only copy had got lost in the post. He gave up the O'Brien moniker and instead wrote a weekly column for the Irish Times under the Myles na Gopaleen nom de plume under the title "The Cruiskeen Lawn" a diverse column that covered satire, fantasy, poetry, politics and repeating characters and ran the gamut from the ludicrously highbrow (occasionally written in ancient Greek) to the intensely lowbrow (pub stories and the perils of drinking) and ran pretty much until he died. He wrote a novel (in gaelic) under this came, entitled An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth).

In the early 60s a new American publisher was looking for books to reprint and they stumbled upon At Swim Two Birds, published it to a fresh audience and it became a cult hit. O'Brien resurrected the name and published a few more books, "The Hard Life" and "The Dalky Archive", which takes De Selby and uses him as a character. In 1966, with cancer, he undertook radiation therapy and was left too long in the machine when a technician forgot the time and he died a few weeks later, on April Fool's Day 1966.

The Third Policeman was only discovered after his death, when it was finally published to an audience FAR more receptive than the contemporaneous one would have been and it's now regarded as his masterpiece.

My review:

This is about my 6th re-read of this novel. One of my favourites. This reading was because a Good Reads book club alongside the Guardian 1000 Greatest Novels had chosen it. Each time I read it, I notice something different. This time I saw how the "great" de Selby's own writings and theories are almost never mentioned in the footnotes that go on for pages, it's all his commentators, and the commentaries on the commentators: another reflection of the infinite regression, boxes within boxes, worlds within worlds idea. In fact, every idea of de Selby's that IS mentioned by the unnamed protagonist is itself dismissed as ludicrous and wrong-headed and either an aberration or a fiction from one of the competing academics studying his works.

There's little more for me to say about the book, except that it appears to be surprisingly intensely divisive. I gave it to my father in law to read and he utterly detested it - to a surprising extent: he was genuinely angry about it after finishing.

But if you like books that cover eternal regression, quantum physics. atomic theory, one-legged men, reincarnation, cubism, obsession, the circular nature of hell and problems and conundrums of personal identity, all wrapped up in a murder story / police procedural and on the side an intense but fleeting and touchingly tender love affair with a bicycle, then this is the book for you.

****

That's a good review. I got a chuckle out of your revelations about De Selby--I think I noticed what you describe, but it was operating at a subconscious level, and your comment brought it to light.

I really enjoyed the book as well--so much that it went on my favorites shelf.

What an interesting observation. I liked the satire on the ridiculousness of philosophers and their theories, and the satire on academic debates that end up as personal attacks, but I never realised that the commentaries were an extension of the box in a box idea. Such a clever book with so many angles to it.