Will I love The Third Policeman?

This book continues to astound me. Flann O’Brien puts together such a surreal set of circumstances for his unnamed narrator that the book is hard to put down.

O’Brien doesn’t strike me as the Hunter Thompson type; this book made me wonder what they were brewing into the whiskey on the Emerald Isle. The improbability of the narrator’s criminal activity and the law enforcement response often seems like a fever dream, albeit a very entertaining one. Even though I now know the M. Knight Shyamalan twist, I still can re-read this book, thinking, “What’s next? What’s next?”

This is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read. It’s suffused with a kind of grim humour that kept me reading through a surreal journey.

I felt sorry for the narrator even as I was repulsed by him. But for me, it fits into this list because of its insistence on the addictive nature of cycling—rendered delightfully, absurdly literal in this book as the policemen are able to quantify to the precise percentage point the degree to which other characters have melded with their bikes. (I think I know a few people in danger of becoming part… show more.

This gem of a book is a dark comedy of extraordinary originality. It explores the moment of a murder and stretches it to the length of a short novel. 

Unlike his hero James Joyce, who sometimes took himself a little too seriously, Briain O'Nolan (Flann O'Brien) remains with his tongue firmly in his cheek. As I lived and worked in Dublin I have a special association with this novel.

If you have ever travelled along the magical Vico Road, south of Dublin, you will have passed the house of De Selby, the fictional annotator of the book, whose scientific theories turn… show more.

I’ll caveat that The Third Policeman isn’t going to delight everyone—it’s a wacky, somewhat bewildering book to wander through.

But it’s also masterfully written, and one of the most creative and exalted ways I know of bicycles appearing in literature.

Probably better known for his novel At Swim-Two-Birds, O’Brien brings the bicycle to life in this murky murder mystery that doubles as a philosophical exploration on humanness and reality.

It’s as if Samuel Beckett wrote a play that prominently features bicycles, directed by the Coen Brothers.

An incredible book, disturbing, harsh, and – of course – really, really funny, The Third Policeman is the great dark surreal novel. A simple story of a man who visits a police station, it soon roots itself in a Tristram Shandy-esque mire of absurdity and confusion with its own sense of seeping dread. All Flann O’Brien is superb, but this is the fiercest of all pancakes.

Sometimes we need to be shaken up a bit, like a bike ride over hard cobblestones. And the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien does just that.

In The Third Policeman, he introduces us to bikes that have absorbed the molecular makeup of their owners, so they no longer need to be ridden to the pub and can trundle off by themselves, to rural policemen who push and pull at the levers of time, to boxes that are packed within boxes within boxes within boxes.

You may not always understand The Third Policeman. But you will almost certainly be delighted… show more.