The Third Policeman

Irish actor Jim Norton’s reading of The Third Policeman is one of my favourite audiobooks, because it added a layer to Flann O’Brien’s novel that I had failed to perceive when I read the prose. Beneath the glorious surrealism and the joy of the tall tale, I found a level of existential horror and of fear.

Neil Gaiman, The Guardian

Thanks to its appearance, albeit briefly, in an episode of Lost, the hugely popular television series about survivors on a desert island, sales of Flann O’Brien’s comic masterpiece have apparently soared. I can’t imagine what this surreal story, set in rural Ireland, about murder, ghosts and people turning into bicycles, has to do with a TV soap that crosses Lord of the Flies with Baywatch. But who cares, if it introduces more people to O’Brien’s sublime comic talent? His writing is invariably compared to those other Irish greats, Joyce and Beckett, but for me he is infinitely more accessible and much funnier. Apart from guaranteeing that it will make you laugh, The Third Policeman is almost impossible to describe: thriller, satire, off-the-wall fantasy, vision of hell steeped in Catholic guilt – it’s all of these, plus romantic weepy towards the end when the narrator, who can’t remember his name and has a wooden leg, falls in love with a lady’s bicycle. Here’s a taste of O’Brien’s prose on the theme of, you’ve guessed, bicycles: “‘The high saddle,’ said the sergeant, ‘was invented by a party called Peters that spent his life in foreign parts riding on camels and other lofty animals, giraffes, elephants and birds that can run like hares and lay eggs the size of the bowl you see in a steam laundry, where they keep the chemical water for taking the tar out of men’s pants. When he came home from the wars, he thought hard of sitting on a low saddle, and one night, accidentally, when he was in bed, he invented the high saddle as the outcome of his perpetual cerebration and mental researches. His Christian name I do not remember. The high saddle was the father of the low handlebars. It crucifies the fork and gives you a blood rush in the head. It is very sore on the internal organs.’ ‘Which of the organs?’ I inquired. ‘Both of them,’ said the sergeant.” I thought Jim Norton reading Ulysses was as good as it gets. This is even better.

Sue Arnold, The Guardian

Flann O’Brien was as surreal a writer as Salvador Dali was a painter, and The Third Policeman is the strangest of all his books. It is about a murder that may or may not have been committed in a house that may or may not be there by a man who has a wooden leg and a soul called Joe, who does not remember who he is and who may or may not be dead. Read aloud in Jim Norton’s lilting, confident brogue, all the musicality and wit of O’Brien’s writing is bought out, and our hero’s dreamlike, circular journey through a looking-glass world of twisted logic becomes almost plausible. Vanishing bicycles, ever more ponderous policemen, houses within houses, a lift down to eternity, coloured winds, shifting states of mind and time – the narrative proceeds with enthralling unpredictability, yet by some miracle, disbelief is suspended. What fun not to know which direction any sentence will take.

Christina Hardyment, The Times

Audiobook of the Week This weird novel was not published until after O’Brien’s death in the 1960s. It’s a strange tale, suited to the rich voices Jim Norton conjures up from the boggy Irish landscape where policemen discourse at Blarneyesque length on molecular transfer between man and bicycle and the problems arising from faulty dentition. The sense of the absurd is heightened by the narrator’s frequent references to the ideas of his favourite philosopher, the patently mad de Selby. It’s clever, funny and inventive – and as disturbing as one should expect from a writer who believed humour to be “the handmaid of sorrow and fear”

Karen Robinson, The Sunday Times