“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers,
smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my
friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers
down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which
he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man
but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole
idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the
one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they
were called for.
I was born a long time ago…”
 |
| Flann O'Brien - real name, Brian O'Nolan |
That’s the opening of ‘The Third Policeman, ’ by Flann O'Brien, and it contains
a psychology of psychopathy. The cool, unemotional account of a violent murder.
The ranking of murder as equal in importance to the manufacture of a bicycle-pump,
and the instant shifting of blame.
Flann O’ Brien is known as a ‘comic writer.’ This is a ‘comic
novel.’ It’s also a masterpiece.
It is very funny — and also bizarre, poetic and despairing. It’s
sinister. This is sinister, eerie, unsettling comedy.
I first read ‘The Third Policeman’ thirty years ago, and on
re-reading, I find that what I remembered are the most comic scenes — the
atomic theory, as applied to bicycles and Irish roads; the men who are more
than 75% bicycle; the delicate legal matter of deciding, when a man who is
predominately bicycle, commits a murder, which should be hung? The man or the
bicycle? And a coffin for a bicycle — 'an intricate piece of joinery.'
I remembered the book as much more light-hearted than, on
re-reading, it actually is. Funny, yes. Comic in the sense of ‘writing that
holds human nature up to ridicule.’ In its inventiveness and originality, it's even playful. But light-hearted? No.
On second-reading, and even while aware of the underlying darkness, I still laughed at the scenes set in the police station — O’Brien’s
inventiveness and verbal audacity is second to none — but was more struck by the
poetry of many passages, and how frightening much of it is. I’ve read ghost stories that don’t manage to convey such an
sense of menace and ill-omen, as, in a few lines, O’Brien does.
The prose is
beautiful. O'Brien could move, with ease, and
with perfect rhythm, often in the same passage, from the cant of the pub, to officialise, to
poetry.
As I read, certain images kept coming into my mind, all
drawn from ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ with its strange, skewed
perspectives.
“As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary
spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side
was a house which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an
advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It
looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or
breadth and looked as if it would not deceive a child… What bewildered me was
the sure knowledge deeply rooted in my mind that this was the house I was
searching for… I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so
unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly
as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in
the remainder. The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had
encountered since I had seen the old man in the chair and I felt afraid of it.”
This sense of nothing being quite as it should, of indeterminate dread, pervades the
book — and is part of the very narration, with its cool, detached, measured
descriptions of terrors and shocks.
The nameless narrator — he tells us he can’t remember his own name — is
an orphan who, due to an accident, has a wooden leg. (The book was written in
the late1930s, before the invention of modern prosthetics.) He has inherited
a fortune, but by the time he is adult and returns to his farm, the money has
been squandered by the caretaker, John Divney.
Both the narrator and Divney are keen to replenish the
fortune — Divney so he can marry, and the narrator so he can publish a book on
the scientist, De Selby, with whom he has become obsessed.
Asides and footnotes on De Selby make up a substantial part
of the book, adding both to its oddness and its cool, detached manner. They
often discuss the competing interpretations and evaluations of De Selby’s life
and work by other scholars, revealing — distantly — a world of academic spite
and in-fighting.
Among De Selby’s theories is the notion that darkness is a
contaminating vapour which emanates from holes in the earth, and contributes to
disease because we inhale it. (This theory was once genuinely held in our
world, before it was established that darkness is an absence of light, rather
than a thing in itself.)
De Selby also argues that if we angle enough mirrors, to
give enough successive reflections of ourselves, we could look into our past. He
claims, by setting up mirrors, to have glimpsed himself at the age of eleven.
He also claims that it would be possible to travel by sitting in a room and
looking at a selection of photographs of our journey.
Many of these theories seem to be twisted, or over-literal
understandings of relativity or quantum theory. Their twisting of time and
space seems to relate to the literally twisted perspective in the description
of the book’s world.
In pursuit of fortune, the narrator and Divney murder the
old man, Mathers. Divney makes off with the cash-box, which he hides, saying
they must spend none of the money until suspicion has died down.
Eventually, Divney reveals where he has hidden the box — in
Mather’s house. They go together, one night, to the deserted half-ruinous murder house,
and while Divney waits outside, the narrator goes in to fetch the box.
From this moment on, the book, already strange, becomes
increasingly bizarre.
The narrator climbs through a window.
“I clambered through the opening and found myself,
not at
once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen.
When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window
seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me.”
He discovers that the cash-box has gone. And then:—
“I heard a cough behind me, soft, and natural yet more disturbing
than any sound that could come upon the human ear. That I did not die of fright
was due to two things, the fact that my senses were already disarranged and
also that…the cough seemed to bring with it some more awful alteration in
everything, just as if it had held the universe standstill for an instant…"
The narrator then takes tea with the old man he has
murdered.
I don’t want to spoil the book by detailing any of the
narrator’s adventures after that. Suffice to say that he meets with two enormous
policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Constable MacCruiskeen, and also with his own
soul. We learn about MacCruiskeen’s hobbies, and even more about De Selby’s
experiments.
We meet the brotherhood of one-legged men, visit Eternity
and, eventually, meet the third policeman, Sergeant Fox.
If the book has a
message, I think it might be that Evil is
self-centred, self-aggrandising, futile and barren. And, possibly, that
to be
such a person is its own punishment, though they will never understand
that.
In
fact, a lack of understanding is perhaps one of the themes of the book.
The narrator obsessively studies the works of De Selby, trying to understand them, and wishing to make them better known - but his understanding of the world around him seems to have dwindled as his knowledge of De Selby increases.
The Third Policeman is a book that blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty,
with poetry, comedy, horror and despair.
His first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds (also a must-read) was
published, and acclaimed, in 1939.
The Third Policeman was his second novel, and it was turned
down. It wasn’t published until 1967, after the author’s death, when it was recognised as the wonderful piece of writing it was.
I wonder if, these days, any conventional publisher would accept it at all?
