THE THIRD POLICEMAN (by Flann O’Brien) A Bicycle Cult Classic Too few people know Flann O’Brien, the comic genius of Ireland, best known for At Swim-Two-Birds, and the true father of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes. [Most Readers do not realize that Angela’s Ashes in parody and self-mockery, in the tradition of O’Brien’s great novel The Poor Mouth, in turn a parody of Ireland Island narratives. They take the book seriously, and thus totally miss the point—in the world of Swift, Joyce, and O’Brien, nothing is ever taken with entire seriousness]. The Bicycle world, however, knows him for The Third Policeman, and for The Dalkey Archive, in which we are introduced to the “atomic theory” of bicycles, and to Irish Policemen obsessed with Bicycles and the crimes associated with them. Sherlock Holmes in a mere amateur compared to these scientific Police Detectives. When our narrator—nameless (O’Brien’s characters often have no names or too many names) first arrives at the rural Police Station, he is asked “Is it about a bicycle?” No crime is of interest to these police unless it relates to bicycles, around which their lives center. In TTP, our nameless narrator becomes a murderer (not selfishly, but, like Raskolnikov, in order to advance the theories and publish his commentaries of de Selby, on which he had made himself an expert), but seeks to recover the stolen goods—in a box hidden by his co-conspirator-- from the local Police, whereupon he is committed to be hanged (In Alice in Wonderland style), not because of evidence, but because he is there, to all of which—in classical Irish humor—he responds without appropriate affect, matter-of-factly, much like Kakfa’s character in The Trial. In a nutshell, according to Sargeant Pluck in TTP, and Sargeant Fotrell in TDA, the atoms of all things, including men and bicycles, are in endless circulation, such that, when brought into sustained contact, each interpenetrates and takes of the character of the other. The Policemen have developed a means of measuring the extent of counter-penetration, that is, of measuring how much this or that person has taken on the character of his bicycle. The most extreme case is, of course, the local postman, whose years of riding have resulted in him being 70% bicycle (the bicycle therefore being reciprocally 70% human). The Police take steps to protect the community by secretly puncturing tires and stealing bicycle parts and accessories, making bicycles temporarily unable to be ridden, that is, committing the very crimes they are to protect against, in order to protect the people from the greater evil of atomic disaster. We find that the leading Policeman in each book actually keeps his own bicycle locked up in a jail cell, when it is not in use. Perhaps they would have been more charitable to Lance Armstrong, from the perspective that, by taking steroids, he was protecting himself from becoming a bicycle, or that, if he were not successful, it is his bicycle that should have been punished (there not being much of the real Armstrong left, which, sadly, appears true: just cold, calculating “medal”). Things become so bad that, after one crime of murder, after judicious consideration, it is the man’s bicycle, and not the man himself, who is hung. The degree of responsibility must be scientifically determined by measurement of the degree of interpenetration and change, made by the expert Policemen. The critical role of The Third Policeman, Officer Fox, who does not appear until midway through Chapter 11, entirely turns the book around. Observations are made on how bicycles and their owners lean the same, and some delicate moral questions are raised about females and female bicycles, or where husbands have occasion to ride their wives’ bicycles. Lurking in the back of each novel are de Selby, and his various theories, amply footnoted (reminiscent of Nabokov’s Pale Fire) by the narrator in TTP, while in TDA we meet de Selby himself. Let us just say that in the first book the narrator is long since dead, and in the second De Selby discovers how to go back in time to meet famous men. De Selby, who had also determined that the world was not a sphere but a sausage, has a plan to blow up the world, the frustration of which is a focus of TDA. A critic, we are informed, has commented that “the beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest.” We also learn that the good Catholic James Joyce is alive and well, living in a suburb north of Dublin, deplores the calumny of having the obscene Ulysses falsely attributed to him, writes pamphlets praising the Virgin Mary, and wants nothing more than, if not to join the Jesuits, at least to serve them by humbly laundering and sewing their underwear. Flann O’Brien is, by some, considered the greatest Irish novelist of the 20th Century after Joyce, and far funnier. At Swim-Two-Birds is deservedly on the list of the 20th Century’s best novels. Since Los Angeles, home of Film Noir and Noir Detective Novels, is full of bicycles, and crime, it is only natural that Angelinos—deeply invested in both-- should be fascinated with a great novel which combines their passions. This brief review cannot more than begin to introduce the novels’ complexities. It would be unfair to tell readers the surprising denouement of TTP, except that it ends with the same question: “Is it about a bicycle?” It is, and no bicycle rider should be without it.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Aug 2013 05:23:04 +0000
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