A Labyrinthine Entertainment: A Review of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

A few posts ago, I introduced my actual readers in cyberspace to my Host of Imaginary Readers (HIR), who question pretty much everything I write, and don't like me as a thinker, a builder of sentences, or as a person in general. The HIR badgers me every time I sit down to work on my novel, and the only thing that allows me to move forward under their crippling attacks is the fact that they're not really there.

I thought I had it pretty bad with my unseen critics, until I read Flann O'Brien's labyrinthine novel At Swim-Two-Birds.

See if you can follow this: An unnamed student spends most of his days in bed, taking occasional excursions to drink stout with his friends and wander the campus where he attends classes. He is working on a novel. His novel concerns an author named Dermot Trellis. Trellis creates characters for his stories and has them live in the same hotel that Trellis lives in. These characters tell stories of their own, creating more characters. That's four layers of narrative to keep track of so far.

Then it gets a little strange because, as our unnamed narrator traverses town, skips school, drinks stout, argues with his uncle, and works on his book, Trellis' characters realize that they are parts of his stories, and that if Trellis sleeps, they are free to do what they want with their lives.

So the characters band together with characters of their own creation to recreate Trellis' own story to put Trellis to sleep. Permanently.

In the meantime, there are diversions into dictionaries, commentaries, narrative subplots, poetry, folk tales, and scripture.

It's a work that captivated James Joyce, Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges, but failed to find such a large and enthusiastic audience. Which is a shame, because At Swim-Two-Birds is one of those books you get to just when you're starting to wonder if you've pretty much been around the block in terms of what books can do. It takes your brain, engages it, kneads it, tickles it, whips it around, delights it, confounds it, and then, lightly, places it back in your skull with a kiss.

So Trellis had it way worse than I have it, for his creative processes were not only criticized by phantom readers, but he was beset and plagued and attacked and drugged by his own creations. But the result for his readers is worth his pain, mainly because he isn't real and we are.

So Ian, inquires my HIR, where are you going with this? Are you just trying to tell us you liked the book? Isn't there a lesson? Are you trying to justify a book merely on its merits as entertainment? Its razzle-dazzle? Is this seriously where you're going to end this review?