The Third Policeman

An absurdist word-swirl that rides its bicycle on the road to hell.

Author: Flann O'Brien

The Third Policeman is a surreal adventure into the guilty mind of a murderer written in 1939. Initially rejected by publishers, it’s non-conformist form has since found a place in the heart of those who laud its experimental style.

The story

The novel begins with a bleak description of the unnamed narrator’s early life in Ireland, where he is born to distant parents who express their indifference by abruptly abandoning him. After having his life upended, he’s sent to a boarding school where he first encounters the works of de Selby, an eccentric intellectual for whom he would ‘commit his greatest sin’.

While away, a man named Divney has been appointed custodian of the family farm and public house, to which the narrator returns with a wooden leg after a short stint seeing the world. Divney is a sly character who’s made himself at home and continues to run the property alone while the narrator devotes himself obsessively to the study of de Selby. However, the family business suffers from Divney’s apparent mismanagement and the narrator’s complete neglect, and financial troubles are soon upon the pair.

Divney proposes a solution to their money woes in the form of a wealthy local man called Mathers, whom Divney describes as being ‘worth a packet of potato-meal’. The narrator acquiesces to being an accomplice to robbery and murder of the old man in order to get hold of his cash box. The pair murder and rob Mathers and so begins the downward spiral of our hero into a hellish nightmare.

Divney has hidden the cash box and it’s clear he intends to double-cross the narrator, who, untrusting of his companion, shadows him (even shares a bed with him) until one day Divney breaks under the pressure of his relentless presence and reveals the location of the cash box, though insisting the narrator recover it alone – from Mathers’ house.

At this point, there is a shift in the narrative and an increasing uncertainty about the narrator’s account of reality after he is forced to confront the ghastly spectre of Mathers, seemingly returned from the dead, and then encounters his own soul (named Joe). When the revived Mathers describes how a person’s colour is the colour of the wind prevailing at the time of his birth and that a translucent gown received from a policeman allows him to predict his life-span, there is a sense that the solidity of the Irish countryside has dissolved into something we cannot yet understand.

From here on, a feeling of disorientation and confusion pervades the narrative through the absurdity of events; descriptions which tell of a mind either inebriated or unwell.

Mathers’ talk of policemen inspires the narrator to seek their assistance in finding the cash box, and he resolves to implement a clever ruse by reporting the theft of his American gold watch. On his way to the police barracks, the narrator meets a fellow one-legged man before arriving at a suspicious structure which turns out to be the barracks. It’s there that he finds the obese Sergeant Pluck, whom he describes as ‘horrible and monstrous’, and his fellow officer MacCruiskeen.

The rest of the story centres around the narrator’s misadventures with the two policemen, and his struggle to endure their fixation with bicycles and the incomprehensible nature of events.

In between these events the character of de Selby is drawn through amusing accounts of his eccentric and occasionally unhinged world view and experiments, such as when he comes to the conclusion that human existence is a ‘succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’ after having examined some old films (which he would later describe as ‘tedious’ and having a ‘strong repetitive element’) frame-by-frame and assuming they would be screened the same way.

The verdict

The book was sporadically hilarious and the style unique and enjoyable; there were passages that I enjoyed reading simply because of the prose and I was surprised to learn it had been written in 1939. However, the priority given to the form (and the concept of the story itself) means that the plot gives way to the surreal representation of the hellish afterlife that the narrator finds himself in.

Sometime in the second half of the book I found my attention wavering from the lack of any plot progression, and I felt I would have appreciated a reader’s equivalent of the Sergeant’s bicycle to speed through sections of it. It did occur to me that, perhaps, the protracted nonsense in some parts was a clever metaphor for the narrator’s tortuous ordeal. Was I, the reader, participating in his infernal punishment?

More recent reviews of the book applaud its humorous but sometimes-aimless meandering as an important and impressive example of post-modernism, even a ‘masterpiece’. The gushing praise wrung from such pretentious intellectualising was ironically reminiscent of the comical musings of de Selby. However, these efforts to intellectualise the work - to scratch beneath the surface and read between the lines - may be evidence that the book, as a whole, is not an especially pleasing or rewarding read. Or, they may simply be the work of idle academics and critics in need of new material.

Overall, The Third Policeman is well-written and (mostly) manages to immerse the reader in a surreal world with some laugh-out-loud moments in between long sections of silliness.