The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien Review

A one-legged farmowning orphan obsessed with an obscure ye olde dead (and fictional) philosopher teams up with his employee to solve his money woes by murdering an old man with a box full of money. Years pass and they seem to have gotten away with it. So they go to dig up the box of money - only to find the old man somehow still alive and the box of money missing. Wha hoppen? So begins a bamboozling journey for our protagonist to report the missing money box to the local police - a duo of fat bicycle-obsessed lunatics who mumble numbers at one another and want to hang someone, anyone. Who is the third policeman?

Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman is one of my bucket list books - a title I’ve been meaning to read for some time now - and, while I’m glad to cross it off the list in my mind, I didn’t think it was all that and a bag of chips.

The novel starts well. It’s a very imaginative, dark tale of two isolated weirdos who feed into each other’s bad ideas until they hit upon the idea of murder most foul. It’s both compelling to read and understandable. It’s when the nameless protagonist sets off to report his missing (stolen) box to the police that things get off the rails and stay there for almost the entire book.

After around the 50 page mark, O’Brien abandons plot and this is where the real book emerges. It’s not about story, character, etc. so much as it is about the author bloviating for much of the remaining 150 pages on a range of topics in a confounding manner. It’s important to note that the author wrote numerous newspaper columns, commenting on the society of the day (1930s-1960s), sometimes satirically, because this is the form that the novel takes once traditional narrative is ousted, perhaps because this was his preferred style of writing?

This is also where the novel lost me. The two policemen talk about bicycles at length, there is something about physics, the justice system, religion and the afterlife. There’s obviously some symbolism going on as well as veiled commentary on T’ings, but I had no idea what I was meant to take away from these rambling passages.

There are extensive digressions on the philosopher character de Selby (huge footnotes galore), which I think is part of the “humour” - a satire on academia, probably - but to what end and how does it fit in with the other ramblings about T’ings? No idea. Nor is it - or the other “jokes” - funny.

The novel may be hugely unengaging to read but it’s never like Finnegans Wake, where the gibberish becomes unbearable after enough pages (and you realise there are hundreds more pages to go and it’s essentially a literary Mobius Strip which never actually ends and you give up the will to read/live and that’s the point); I could keep reading it, which is a credit to O’Brien’s prose.

The book also ends strongly. We finally meet the third policeman and O’Brien explains the surrealism of the preceding 150 pages (twice - my edition included a fragment of a letter from O’Brien to the American playwright William Saroyan which spells it out even more clearly if you didn’t pick it up from the novel). The inclusion of the main character’s soul, Joe, as its own character is also a hint early on as to what’s really going on.

But the narrative was too static, with characters blathering on about things that made no sense for too long, to be called an enjoyable read. The Third Policeman is for modernist fans only - a scattershot, incomprehensible novel about (possibly) any number of things you either don’t care about or do but won’t find anything being said about them especially inspired. It’s too cryptic for its own good - it bored me into indifference with its overindulgently-extended wackiness where anything meaningful it may have said ended up falling on shrugging shoulders.