To Sing His Praises: A review of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

I do not know my audience, so I have the privilege of imagining them. I'm sure that a few of my friends from Facebook pop over to my blog, shake their heads at the amount of time I spend reading, and go back to watching that Bed Intruder song on youtube.

The other three readers are subject to my imagination, so I create the readers I want. Readers who will foam at the mouth when I say that the great Borges himself was a fan of Flann O'Brien, and marveled at the labyrinthine masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. They will nod with respect when they hear that Graham Greene championed the unknown Irish writer, and they will gasp when they learn that James Joyce himself, the exalted one, the reinventor of the novel, the pope of Irish literature, was a big fan of Flann O'Brien.

In the course of this review, I have captivated this imaginary audience. They are hanging on, teeth clenched, knuckles white, noses running. It must be flu season in imaginaryland. The problem with such a well-versed audience is that they quickly become agitated. Their illness makes them irritable. Their wealth of literary knowlege runs away from me, and they become an angry swarm. Quickly, I placate them with a summary of The Third Policeman to keep them at bay while I think of what to say about the book.

An unnamed character, vague in personality and motivation, obsessed with an obscure thinker name DeSelby (who presents a theory and defense of the idea that the world is sausage-shaped instead of round), commits a murder for money. After hiding the loot, he returns for it, and finds himself in an increasingly bizarre, aggravating, and insane loop of events which turns out to be... You thought I was going to give it away, didn't you? Hah!

Reading O'Brien is watching a great mind move unafraid. There is dark humor, bright humor, slapstick, tragedy, and, ultimately, underneath it all, a kind of subdued horror at human absurdities.

I assume that during the course of reading this review, all of my imaginary readers, unable to resist their massive intellectual curiosity, have gone out and read the book. Wasn't it great?

And finally, after the last page is closed and we are all reeling from the sheer originality of this work, here's the shocker: This book was never published during O'Brien's lifetime. No publisher would accept it! O'Brien, admired by the kings of literature in his day, could not get a reading with the masses outside of his newspaper column, and The Third Policeman, arguably his masterpiece (although I'm partial to At Swim-Two-Birds), perished largely unread, and has only found an audience in recent years, as it was unearthed.

So here, imaginary readers, is the question we must ask ourselves: who are we overlooking in our day? Who deserves a reading, but isn't getting one? Who is the Flann O'Brien of our era? I send you forth with this charge: find her or him and bring the writer to me, that I may review her or his work and thus claim a little bit of the genius apparent there.