The Third Policeman ~ Flann O'Brien

The TV series Lost sparked a new interest in this novel. It is a truly bizarre but very funny story, told by a murderer. who ends up in an alternate reality in Ireland where people can turn into bicycles and you can visit Eternity via a lift. You can also leave via the lift, but there is a catch—you must weigh the same when leaving as when you first arrived. Which upsets our narrator no end, because in Eternity he had been able to obtain some solid gold bars and thousands of pounds worth of jewels!


In this alternative reality people who ride their bicycles for too long can eventually turn into one. You can tell when this has happened to a person because they need to prop themselves up on counters, or lean against a wall. If they fall over they can’t get up again.

The story runs in a loop, and at the end you realise there is no end. It reminded me of the Alfred Noyes short story Midnight Express in that regard.

There were some rather unnecessary (long) footnotes throughout relating to a fictional character known as De Selby who appears in O’Brien’s other works and they did annoy me, but on the whole I could read this book again, it was brilliant.

Maxine

In a letter to William Saroyan, dated 14 February 1940, O'Nolan explained the strange plot of The Third Policeman:

“When you get to the end of this book you realise 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.”

Source: Wikipedia

Note: Flann O’Brien was one of Brian O’Nolan’s pseudonym’s and although The Third Policeman was written between 1939 and 1940 it wasn’t published until 1967 (Sadly, O’Nolan died in 1966).