The Third Policeman

This book is apparently quite well-known, but it was new to me - I was led to it by Brian Catling's list of favorite books in The Week of June 4th. Few things are better than finding a book as entertaining and peculiar as this one out of the blue. Although this surreal novel is overall quite disturbing, it is frequently as funny as anything I've read in a long while. When it was originally rejected, the reviewer at Longman's wrote, We realize the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so. I find even this bit of associated history delightful. O'Nolan (O'Brien is a pen name) eventually claimed that the manuscript was lost, but it sat in open view on his sideboard for 26 years. It was, either ironically or appropriately, published a year after his death. That this book should lie in obscurity while Sartre's No Exit is so famous, confirms the greatness of the former by De Selby's second law.
Looking over my notes I see many great new words for me including, hereditament, oxters, and stoons. My one and only complaint is that the author did not recognize that, when executed, people are hanged not hung (this might be the work of a posthumous editor).

Delightfully nutty book - a basically anonymous narrator somewhere in Ireland who has done some things which might lead one to want to remain somewhat anonymous; after a benign youth in which his leg was broken on his behalf, he becomes a benign adult who only wants to engage in a little thievery here and there. He and his untrustworthy associate go to relief a house of the valuables in it when suddenly our hero finds himself in a very unusual place. He encounters two policemen at a one dimensional house who tell him about some interesting things like very pointy daggers, the dangers of allowing your identity to flow into bicycles and vice versa, and so forth. Our hero wants to maintain a relationship with his bicycle but the problem with the leg can be unhelpful in that regard. Ultimately a lot of silly stuff happens, with or without the collaboration of his fellow one legged unsavory ruffians who all also are trying to minimize associations with the titular policemen, until the astonishing revelations of the ending. If you enjoy this book, move on to At Swim-Two-Birds by the same author as soon as you can, because that one is also delightful.