The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
Flann O’Brien, renowned comedian and the prize-winning author of “At Swim-Two-Birds,” has created a masterpiece of dark humour. The Third Policeman is only comparable to “Alice in Wonderland” as an allegory of the absurd. It is a thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the tale of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt. The English language’s only example of “The Third Policeman” is distinguished by its never-ending humorous innovation and its expert juggling of reality and fiction.
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
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The Third Policeman is an author-to-reader and, in a broader sense, to society at large, communication. As each reader has the right to respond to O’Brien’s conjuring in his or her own unique way, I’ll forgo the preliminary and concluding scholarly and insightful evaluations here. Now that I think about it, I can see that Donoghue and I feel very similarly about The Third Policeman. I get my inspiration from my immediate familiarity with the novel as an artifact, whereas he is more influenced by the breadth of his reading and expertise. Fortunately, I share some of Donoghue’s knowledge of the sources from which O’Brien drew inspiration for his novel’s storyline, cast, and structure.
The book’s characters are all reversed. Most of them have a main goal. The aim of the omnipresent narrator is to obtain a black box from a guy he has murdered because he believes it will make him wealthy and because it transforms into a box with occult abilities that will force everyone to obey his bidding. Although the narrator does not go that far, it is similar to a gold box that King Midas would have owned. Since The Third Policeman is a book that is largely a dream that appears to be true in a land of no time, he actually does not get very far at all.
Author O’Brien avoids discussing quantum physics, which looks to have an infinite number of lower and lower elements until one reaches quarks and gluons, then antimatter, on a popular level (which, according to my rules of logic, would be no matter.) O’Brien, however, is mesmerized by the notion of unending progression as initially depicted by Mathers’ endlessly receding eyes after the narrator had killed him.
The work is interesting to read because of its quirks and distinctions from conventional realistic fiction, which uses cliched language to describe places and people. Each and every character, like in Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland, is grotesque and, as such, a projection from the narrator. They are wonderful. In the book, sleep is given a lot of attention, and the implication is that since life has lost its zest, sleeping is preferable to waking up.
It’s undoubtedly up there among my favourite works of fiction. The book takes place in a bizarre, surreal world with its own particular logic, despite the fact that the precise storyline is impossible to characterize in any meaningful way. If taken out of context, none of it makes any sense. Space and time are distorted, a lift can take you to eternity, bicycles are sentient, there is a colour that can tell if someone is upset when they see it, and death can be foretold by the colour of the wind when a person is born. It’s a novel that begs to be read repeatedly because it’s too hazy to seem like it’s telling the same tale each time.
