The unnamed narrator, writing from the author’s own point of view as an undergraduate, spends most of his time lolling in bed or getting drunk on stout with fellow students. He creates a character, a would-be author himself, who is writing his own novel, derived from Irish folklore, cowboy adventures and ‘the plain people of Ireland,’ and who, in turn, commissions another novel, in which the first begetter is to be tortured, tried and executed, thus liberating everyone he has been writing about. At Swim-Two-Birds moved Joyce to commend O’Brien as ‘a real writer with the true comic spirit’. The parodic exaggerations are indeed excruciatingly funny.

In his second novel, the best of five, he founded his imaginative comic originality on his concept of everlasting hell. A Catholic to the end of his days, with Manichaean emphasis on the conflict between light and dark, Brian O’Nolan evidently brought to Flann O’Brien a sense of guilt that no jokes could quite assuage. Mainly because of the wartime paper shortage, Longmans rejected The Third Policeman. O’Brien was humiliated. He hid the manuscript and said he had lost it. When it was found and published after his death it was acclaimed.

In the meantime, in The Dalkey Archive, he cannibalised the ‘lost’ novel, deriding science as an explanation for life in the person of the wonderfully eccentric de Selby, who, in The Third Policeman, defined night as ‘an insanitary condition caused by the accretion of black air’ and human existence as ‘a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief’. Flann sets forth de Selby’s bizarre theories intermittently throughout the novel, with long footnotes on the interpretations of rival academic commentators, who are equally preposterous. But these passages are no less logical than the beliefs of the policemen in hell that there are atomic exchanges between bicyclists and the bicycles they sit on, rendering men part bicycles and bicycles part men, and that it is worth spending years making chests and chests within chests, eventually so small that they are too small to see.

The Poor Mouth, written in Irish and translated into English, is about unrelieved poverty and bad weather in the Gaeltacht of West Ireland. The novel’s animals are kept in a thatched cottage while the family live in a byre, and relief can be gained only in prison. The translator, Patrick C. Power, said the book ‘should have acted as a cauterisation of the wounds inflicted on Gaelic Ireland by its official friends’. The Hard Life, of urban and modern deprivations, is less vigorously fortified by O’Brien’s sardonic humour.

The Third Policeman withstands the closest scrutiny as the chef-d’oeuvre, with damnation inescapable from the opening sentence and hell revealed as eternally circular and almost unbearably absurd.

Warning: There is no magical substance that Flann O’Brien calls ‘omnium,’ with which to create whatever one desires. Repeated rereading of his works may cause advanced dementia.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP