BOOK 241: THE THIRD POLICEMAN: FLANN O'BRIEN

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.

The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction (At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.

(From Goodreads)

MY VERDICT: I’m not going to lie, this book was quite perplexing to me. I went in blind, having no idea what to expect and let the weirdness and surrealism wash over me without questioning the logic of it too much. I think I was able to do this because it was a short book, if it was much longer I might have got exasperated with the confusion. I can see why people enjoy this book and find the humour in it, but this just wasn’t for me, it wasn’t my kind of humour. That’s not to say I wouldn’t recommend it to someone, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

TRIVIA: The Third Policeman was featured in a 2005 episode of television series Lost with the intent of providing context for the show's complex mythology, with the result that sales of the book in the three weeks following its mention equalled what it had sold in the preceding six years.

John Cooper Clarke's nonsense prose poem, "Ten years in an open necked shirt" contains the line "What with the drink trade on its last legs and the land running fallow for the want of artificial manures", the same line John Divney uses in the book to explain their lack of funds.

Irish musician Hozier referenced The Third Policeman in the tracks De Selby (Part 1) and De Selby (Part 2) on his 2023 album Unreal Unearth.