Rewind book: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien (1967)
Have there ever been coppers like the trio in Flann O'Brien's ?
by Flann O’Brien
Dalkey Archive Press
Have there ever been coppers like the trio in Flann O'Brien's ?
There's Sergeant Pluck, whose body seems red and swollen, from his enormous hands to his "violent red moustache". Pluck, like his two colleagues, is obsessed with bicycles. "Would it be true," he asks our narrator, "that you are an itinerant dentist and you came on a tricycle?"
There's MacCruiskeen, whose surname is an in-joke for O'Brien fans: he wrote a newspaper column, , under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien is itself a pseudonym for Irish author Brian O'Nolan).
Clues to all the strangeness sprout like Pluck's moustache. There is the unnamed narrator with a wooden leg and an obsession with (a fictional) physicist called De Selby, whose bizarre notions about the universe sound eerily like O'Brien's novel. The plot throws him into a darkly farcical murder story which leads eventually to the three policemen, whose help he wants in tracking down a cash box.
Their barracks take our peculiar narrator by surprise: "I seemed to see the front and the back of the 'building' simultaneously." This oddness only increases as our narrator makes his Dantesque way through the strange interior.
The building has a basement which does an eerie impression of eternity: "Is this the entrance to the next world?" our narrator asks. It could be. Here is a basement where policemen don't age because time stands still, a torch turns men into grey powder, and everything is possible. "What else is there?" asks the narrator. "Anything," replies the sergeant.
Our narrator rides a bicycle to meet the titular Third Policeman, an omnipotent being named Fox, who bears the face of the murdered man. "His face was completely hidden in the dark and nothing was clear to me except his overbearing policemanship … his domination and unimpeachable reality."
was O'Brien's second work of fiction after the acclaimed . His desire to flout authority, both legal and literary (our narrator may not be the living, breathing person he seems), baffled publishers in Ireland and elsewhere and the novel remained unpublished until the year after his 1966 death. It is fitting, given the policemen's obsession with bicycles, that passages and characters were recycled in O'Brien's subsequent book, .
