Review: The Third Policeman

Title: The Third Policeman
Author: Flann O’Brien
Nationality: Irish
Year: 1940
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Length: 200+pp
Rating: 10/10
Summary: On your bike...

The outline

Delightful weirdness characterises this surreal early post-modern novel with a fixation about bicycles.

Sample

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby’s explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object-to the eyes of a man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye. So far, one may say, so good.

The verdict

The Third Policeman is a far from easy novel to describe. I could relate the basics of the plot – murderous Irishman comes across a rural police station where the officers have an obsession with bicycles – but that’s really not the point. It’s funny, its surreal, its clever... but then so are lots of novels. There’s just something special about The Third Policeman that makes it far more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a novel which should appeal to fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and Laurence Sterne. At times it’s a bit like The Trial, rewritten by James Joyce as a Monty Python sketch.

Put simply, The Third Policeman is utterly brilliant. And I’m not going to spoil it by revealing any more.