Paperback, 208 pages
English language
Published Aug. 16, 1993 by Flamingo.
The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966. It was published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967.
I don't usually read horror but I have enjoyed other surreal horror books in the past. This novel was one of the most unusually cozy novels I have read given the surreal nature; like an anti-Lovecraftian. You read on with anticipation and curiosity rather than dread.
I quite enjoyed this book. It's one of those where a bunch of weird things happen and I'm left wondering "Is this saying something? Or is it just a bunch of weird things happening?" I remember having the same reaction to 100 years of solitude.
For example, one policeman is obsessed with bicycles. Does that signify something or is it just a silly idea that O'Brien thought was funny so he put it in his book?
So, I'll say that I did enjoy this book, although maybe I'm missing some of the profound insight that makes it a classic?
As some other people have mentioned, various editions of this book have introductions or afterwords that destroy much of the pleasure of reading it; I definitely advise reading just the text of the book, skipping anything before or after, even if it's the author's own words excerpted from a letter or something.
This is a wildly imaginative, funny, grotesque, confusing, mind-bending book in which things happen from their own crazy internal logic, mundane notions of making-sense be damned. For me the enjoyment here is about experiencing the craziness, its shapes and textures, maybe thinking about the various things it might mean, what might be going on, what other crazy things it's similar to or different from, and generally experiencing the waves and whorls of uncertainty that it produces. (So the warned-against front and back matter, which say very blandly "what is happening is X", interfere significantly with that!)
Images from …
As some other people have mentioned, various editions of this book have introductions or afterwords that destroy much of the pleasure of reading it; I definitely advise reading just the text of the book, skipping anything before or after, even if it's the author's own words excerpted from a letter or something.
This is a wildly imaginative, funny, grotesque, confusing, mind-bending book in which things happen from their own crazy internal logic, mundane notions of making-sense be damned. For me the enjoyment here is about experiencing the craziness, its shapes and textures, maybe thinking about the various things it might mean, what might be going on, what other crazy things it's similar to or different from, and generally experiencing the waves and whorls of uncertainty that it produces. (So the warned-against front and back matter, which say very blandly "what is happening is X", interfere significantly with that!)
Images from this book will stick with me forever; the ever-smaller set of boxes, the elevator that weighs you on the way down, the careful placement of bicycle parts, the works of de Selby, the soul named Joe... Well! You should read it for yourself; highly recommended.
What I like and dislike about the Third Policeman would all be classified as spoilers, I think. I hate that kind of review.
It is, at least, interesting and more than simply weird.
