The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien

That can be answered, he said. There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.

He disappeared the next morning on his bicycle and when he came back very dusty and travel-worn at the end of three days, he told me that everything was all right and that four barrels of better porter could be expected on Friday. It came punctually on that day and was well bought by the customers in the public house that night. It was manufactured in some town in the south and was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win. The customers praised it highly and when they had it inside them they sang and shouted and sometimes lay down on the floor or on the roadway outside in a great stupor. Some of them complained afterwards that they had been robbed while in this state and talked angrily in teh shop the next night about stolen money and gold watches which had disappeared off their strong chains. John Divney did not say much on this subject to them and did not mention it to me at all. He printed the words--Beware of Pickpockets--in large letters on a card and hung it on the back of shelves beside another notice that dealt with cheques. Nevertheless a week rarely passed without some customer complaining after an evening with 'The Wrastler'. It was not a satisfactory thing.

The 'Codex' (first so-called by Bassett in his monumental De Selby Compendium) is a collection of some two-thousand sheets of foolscap closely hand-written on both sides. The signal distinction of the manuscript is that not one word of writing is legible. Attempts made by different commentators to decipher certain passages which look less formidable than others have been characterised by fantastic divergencies, not in the meaning of the passages (of which there is no question) but in the brand of nonsense which is evolved. One passage, described by Bassett as being 'a penetrating treatise on old age' is referred to by Henderson (biographer of Bassett) as 'a not unbeautiful description of lambing operations on an unspecified farm'. Such disagreement, it must be confessed, does little to enhance the reputation of either writer.

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

My second foray into Flann O'Brien. He is still unique. The Third Policeman was not quite as enjoyable a read as At-Swim-Two-Birds but I put this down to the former's more mundane topic. Surely hell is intriguing--The Inferno is always more Popular than Paradisio--but when hell is policemen on bicycles who are more concerned with headlamps and bike pumps, hell loses all of its draw and becomes the most terrifying thing it could be: eternally boring.
On a completely different note, O'Brien technique of manufacturing his own world of footnotes and scholarship is one that I admire greatly and have seen imitated in authors like David Foster Wallace. O'Brien carries on a very technical discussion of the great (and imaginary) philosopher De Selby. One footnote carries over filling almost two full pages. The dead pan with which O'Brien achieves this--beautiful. I don't think this style would work unless someone approached it both with the seriousness and ridiculousness of O'Brien. The theories propounded by De Selby, which we hear of through the footnotes, are so incredible, they bring a depth and readability to the story that makes them anything but footnotes. That truly would be hell: The Third Policeman without footnotes.