The Third Policeman

Written by Flann O'Brien

Narrated by Jim Norton

Flann O’Brien’s most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder. Weird, satirical, and very funny, it is read by Irish master reader Jim Norton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Apr 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9789629548544

Flann O'Brien

Flann O'Brien was a pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he spent most of his life in Dublin, where he worked as a civil servant and died in 1966. Best known for The Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds, he is one of the most influential Irish writers of the twentieth century, regarded by many as its answer to Nabokov, and his books are dazzling works of farce, satire, folklore and absurdity.

Reviews for The Third Policeman

[chicjohn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Surreal, satirical funny tale

[beabatllori · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pay attention now. In order to enjoy this book, you must mix equal parts of:

Kafka

Borges

Douglas Adams

LSD

Stir carefully. If your head hurts, put it down for a while and take an aspirin. Other than that, it's brilliant. Just brilliant.

[macha_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

4 and a half stars. one of my favourite writers, and every once in a while it's time to reread this one. it's a very funny spoof of science, logic, academic writing, and metaphysics, chaotic but organized, elegant and playful. everyone should own it. though i warn you, it's gonna lead to reading a lot more of Brian O'Nolan's body of work in every pseudonym and style - even his hilarious and very pointed journalistic columns for the Irish Times read just the same. but also, this classic jumps every genre line (surrealistic sf? existential mystery? Lewis Carrollist discourse delivered in absurdist mode? an allegory about heaven and hell? okay, all of the above, and more, in the loose and unassuming structure of an Irish tall tale). but this read, i marvelled at how the narrative seamlessly describes quantum space, utilizing string theory, as it demonstrates the folding up of dimensions and peers at the possible contents of a Schrodinger's box - even though the book was written in 1940, and appears weightless in content and style, while it reads like a fever dream.

[dylanwolf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book unlike any other. What begins as a the tale of two people breaking in to an old house in Ireland and committing a murder slides inexorably into a Daliesque nightmare of eluslve realities and pulsating time and space, populated with half-people, half-bicycle characters. This is one of the strangest journeys you'll go on and you'll soon decide whether it is one you wish to see through to the end or discard. The book oscillates between the sinister and farce but always stays on the far side of the bizarre line. Interestingly the book takes us on a circuitous route to leave us back where we started and comparisons with Joyce, Kafka and Beckett are inevitable but futile - like the works of those geniuses this is also an original.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To explain what this book is about would be to spoil it - it only makes sense once the reader reaches the end and things become clearer, which isn't to say clear. The book is funny, idiosyncratically, funny as in amusing, funny as in confusing, and funny also as in weird. Superficially, it is also clever, but the bits I thought were clever at first did not completely add up upon consideration; his would be recherché references are all made up, some obviously so. What this book does have to recommend it though, aside from the peculiar brand of humour, is the confusion afforded to the reader. Confusion is not normally a good thing, but here it plays a vital part of the story, as the character is in a state of confusion for a good proportion of the book, which the reader must partake in also to be able to appreciate what, against the odds, turns out to be a surprisingly well cobbled together piece of fiction.

[collinsdanielp · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not what I expected. Very funny, made me laugh on numerous occasions.

[dekedastardly · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The initially peculiar writing style, which put me in mind of Magnus Mills, grew on me to become a flashback of listening in as a child to Irish adult conversations not quite understanding but feeling strangely comforted in alienation. By the time a character used the word gawm to describe himself O'Brien had already drawn me deep into the colloquialism. This is an exaggerated world of a band of wooden legged men and half man half bicycle policemen, and yet there is a straightforward robbery and murder plot underpinning the strangeness. The story has moments of horror, comedy, and tenderness, and segments which exercise the mind with intriguing possibilities of what lies beyond our wordly perceptions of normality. The plot leaves plenty of scope to wander and wonder ahead the various twists and turns. The dreamlike quality of the narrative reflects a stream of unconciousness which becomes clear in a beautifully crafted finale. The book contains numerous footnotes which are undoubtedly clever in their seemingly important referencing of the works and experiences of a fictitious physician and intellectual, though at times these become a tediously distracting sideshow whilst allowing the author to run a parallel story written with a completely different style of prose.The Third Policeman is throughly entertaining work best read in your favoured rural Irish dialect.

[tedmahsun_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Supremely absurd, but brilliantly witty.

[sharonlflynn_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I adore this book. It is deeply cynical and very observant of Irish personalities and attitudes.

[littlebookworm_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I didn’t like this one. I’m not a fan of absurdist humor and stories that don’t really make sense without external explanation. Not recommended.

[markhopp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.” ― Flann O'Brien, The Third PolicemanThis is an insane book. I mean that in the best way, I really do: So much bizarre stuff happens in this book, you have to turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride. Policemen obsessed with bicycles. Wooden-legged men. Murderers. Eternity. It's all here, and it's all worth reading. What a pancake!

[zibilee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this surreal and absurdist novel, a one-legged gentleman farmer is easily swayed into concocting the murder of a man believed to have a black box full of money. His partner in crime, the loathsome Divney, refuses to reveal the whereabouts of the black box for several years, ostensibly to avoid discovery. This forces the farmer to spend every waking moment in Diveny's shadow, for fear that he'll recover the box without sharing its contents. When the location of the box is finally revealed, the farmer goes off to retrieve it and discovers that old man Mathers, the man who was supposedly murdered, is actually alive and well. Trying to concoct another way of separating the box from his owner, the farmer devises a plan to go down to the police station to fill out a false theft report, only to discover that a world of strangeness and unpredictability awaits him. As the policemen revolve around him in nonsensical circles, the farmer discovers a secret plot involving the melding of bicycles and men (!!) that threatens to take over the countryside. He also learns that these seemingly benign men have the secret keys to eternity and the ability to create fabulous and wonderful inventions that defy the mind's capability to perceive them. Though puzzled by what the policeman present to him, he soon discovers he's in serious danger and his only hope for survival is a congregation of wandering one-legged men and a strangely female bicycle. Both uproariously funny and puzzlingly sinister, this work of comic genius written by Flan O'Brien was published posthumously in the 60's and is still as representative of the enigmas of life today as it was back then.A few months ago I was at a party and met a wonderful girl by the name of Melissa who's studying literature in college. We got into a deep conversation about books and she told me she was taking a literature course based on the books that have appeared in the television series Lost. I was greatly intrigued by this class and wondered aloud why there were no classes like this when I was in college. As she was describing some of the books she was reading, she began to get very animated about this particular book. From what she told me, it sounded like a trip and a half, and like something that I just couldn't pass up. When she got to the part about the relationship between bicycles and humans, I knew I was going to read this book and it was going to be fantastic. I wasn't disappointed in the least and I can only assume that Flan O'Brien was a genius, not only in the way he creates this particular story but in its off-the-wall narration. It was one hell of a weird ride, but I must confess it made my top book of the year, which says a lot considering I've read some pretty good stuff.This book is told through a deceptively simple style of prose. Though we know that the gentleman farmer is up to no good and is, in effect, a murderer, I couldn't help but get invested in his tale and come to feel for the man. When he finally goes to retrieve the black box from its hidden location, old man Mathers has some seriously disturbing and puzzling news for him. It's not very clear just what this news means, but the farmer is not only flummoxed and enraged, he's also scared and sets out to find a way to separate this box from its owner. The first sections of this book differed from all the rest in that most of it was easily comprehensible. Farmer, box and old man were eerily interpreted but pretty straightforward. Had this book continued on in this vein, it wouldn't have been anything to write home about. Luckily for me, the book picked up a lot of steam and became increasingly bizarre and funny as soon as the farmer stepped inside the police station.As the farmer arrives at the station house, he realizes that its dimensions and attributes are physically impossible. This troubles him greatly and he begins to think that coming to the station to fill out a lost item form may have been a bad idea. He has no idea what's in store for him when he finally meets the first two policeman. These policeman are inordinately consumed with bicycles and question the man endlessly about them, a fact that the man doesn't understand at all. When a strange gentleman comes into the station and admits that his bicycle has been stolen again, the police mount a search for the missing bike and our perplexed farmer finds out that in this strange place, bicycles are a thing of intentional menace and danger. This confuses him and the reader shares his feelings of confusion and foreboding, knowing that there is much about the bicycles that we just cannot know. It's also very comical that there is so much malice and weirdness associated with the bicycles, and a lot of this story is utterly absurd and nonsensical. It's all a whirlwind of comic perplexity, and as such, the only thing I could do was let it wash over me with a sense of ludicrous wonder.Meeting the second policeman puts the farmer at a greater sense of unease, for the man is an inventor of the highest order but his inventions make absolutely no sense in any way that inventions should. One example is the finely crafted box. This box is about palm-sized and is beautifully inlaid with intricate carvings and gold. As the farmer examines the box, he comes to discover that this box hold two hundred identical boxes of the same quality, each small enough to fit inside the other. The smallest box is so tiny that the naked eye cannot discern it, and this, in addition to all the other wild inventions, has a frightening effect on the farmer. As more and more inventions are introduced to the farmer, he becomes increasingly more afraid for reasons the reader can't understand, and decides that he will no longer speak to the second policeman for fear of what may happen to him. Some of these inventions are amazingly bizarre and mystifying and others are silly and nonsensical. The reaction of the farmer is one that confuses the reader and it's not until the end of the book that we understand why.When the policeman reveal their knowledge of the farmer's misdeed, they decide to build a gallows and hang him. Despite the fact that they have shown him their fabulous inventions and the secrets of eternity, they must punish him for his crime, and set off to get things prepared. This is when the farmer remembers the deal he struck with the leader of a strange band of one legged men, and he calls to him for help. When a female bicycle comes to his aid, the farmer escapes to the hovel of the third policeman and learns the truth about all he has seen and heard. This third policeman is off the grid and is operating under the guise of secrecy. He reveals the real secret of eternity that is hidden to all but him and he shares all his secrets with the farmer. Now the farmer is deathly afraid and goes to seek out old Divney for help. But when he reaches Divney, things become frighteningly clear to him and the farmer realizes just what has happened to him and why he's trapped in this absurd and strange conundrum. All of this sounds menacing but it's also comically brilliant and unlike anything I've ever read before.I know my review of this book doesn't do it justice, and frankly, I doubt if any review ever could. It was a strange amalgam of farce, satire and horror, and told a fantastical tale that kept me flipping pages to see what O'Brien would come up with next. Nothing was predictable or ordinary, and even the hidden nuances of the book were strangely surreal and wildly funny. A lot will probably never make sense to me, and in a way it reminded me a lot of Alice's time in Wonderland. It had the same feel of crafty nonsensicalness and was full of amazing and unorthodox components that made the whole wildly atypical and divergent from anything I have ever read before. If you're in the mood for something strange that will knock your socks off, this is the book for you! It's a book I will be pondering over for a long time.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There may be something wrong with a book that requires an explanatory note from the publisher at the end just so you can figure it out. I read this book because it was supposed to shed some insight into what’s going on in the TV show Lost, and indeed, there are several parallels. There is a strange world that doesn’t operate according to the laws of physics. There is an underground place where a mysterious substance called omnium produces whatever you like, much like Lost‘s “magic box.” There are also three strange-looking policemen who are obsessed with bicycles and taking meaningless recordings, who make their police barracks inside a two-dimensional house and the walls of a mansion, and who tend to describe difficult things as “a pancake” (whereas pancakes are actually very easy). If you’re looking for clarification, you won’t find it here, I’m afraid.I do get that hell is repetition, and this is O’Brien’s vision of hell. While I don’t find the book to be particularly funny, despite its description as a comic novel, it is, despite its absurdity, very readable, and that’s what saves it for me. I may not understand everything that’s going on, but I do want to find out what happens next. How it all relates to the endless footnotes about the fictional wacko philosopher de Selby, who is the obsession of the no-name narrator — well, maybe I’ll let someone else figure that out.

[adzebill · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had figured out this was in the vein of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or The Man Who Was Thursday, but the ending was even neater than I anticipated. A fabulous piece of absurdism, both funny and unsettling, told in a dry and elliptical tone in a distinctly roundabout Irish way.

[ashleytylerjohn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An unusual book, to be sure. Its closest counterpart might be Alice in Wonderland, but where Alice has whimsy, clever wordplay, unforgettable characters, and the most quotable dialogue this side of Shakespeare, The Third Policeman has a strangeness, an obsession with bicycles, and a rather limited palette of actors and settings.

It sparked into life on a few occasions (most notably in the discussion of DeSelby, a philosopher/physicist who never appears but whose ideas are revealed at length), but was ultimately a bit wearying. The final chapter had some power--I can imagine the same book at half the length (just cut any reference to a bicycle) and it would be much more satisfying.

(Probably bicycles are metaphors for something and if I figured it out I'd enjoy the book 1000 times more, but I didn't, so I didn't).

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think this is my first Flan O'Brien. A weird story but surprisingly entertaining. Set in rural Ireland, its a tale of murder, bicycles, other dimensions. Those Irish can sure tell tall tales. The ending is great but giving it away would be a shame. "Is it about a bicycle?"

[billycongo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was ahead of its time, and a very fascinating read. The book that brought me to this and 'At Swim Two Birds' was 'The Dalkey Archive'. My preference is for 'The Dalkey Archive', because it has a great sense of humour.

[delta351 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was originally attracted to this book after it was featured in an episode of Lost, where Jacob was reading it as J Locke was thrown out the window by his father. It took me a while to track down a copy of the book, and a while longer before I actually read it. The only other Irish author or book that I had read was Joyce's "Portrait of a Young Man..". I found the book quite readable, and would have been even more so had I skipped the footnotes. The plot was fairly easy to follow, as much as I understood. The quirky concepts like the sausage universe and the bicycle personification were quite entertaining. The copy that I read had some footnotes in it, which helped me to understand some parts. I still really don't understand the entire bicycle concept, but it will prob make more sense if I ever read it again. Bicycles were very common back when the story was originally written, and prob had a definitive role in life in Ireland at that time. I thought the representation of eternity was good also.

[blanderson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A genuinely funny and odd novel, that may have been dampened/spoiled by O'Brien's note at the end, which gives away the ending and kills the suspense of the last 30 pages. DO NOT FLIP TO THE END OF THE BOOK! I like reading all the notes at the end of these fancy editions, but usually they don't contain spoilers.

A hilariously metaphysical comedy riffing on the nature of subjectivity and the everything-goes world of atomic relativity. O'Brien applies this weird version of Reality in a good satire of society---the police continually trying to 'control' the world, even when it is only themselves causing the chaos.

The end of the book did lag, but overall a very good read.

[malrubius · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hilarious and absurd and surreal and beautifully strange. Great writing, great characters, great setting. I was disappointed to find that I didn't understand everything and it had to be explained in an author's note at the end.

[jimelkins · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone has a theory about this novel. There are at least four common kinds of explanations:1. Flann O'Brien is the forgotten postmodernist, the one who didn't leave Ireland. The "Third Policeman" is one of the last books Joyce read, and by implication the "Third Policeman" is a kind of Doppelgaenger to "Finnegans Wake." Its play with language and its reflexivity about the novel form is somehow parallel to Joyce's.2. Flann O'Brien was an alcoholic, and this is the product of so many unhappy binges and half-remembered delusions. The book is an indirect but eloquent record of that generation in Ireland, when the humor was desperate, when the church was all-powerful, when what's now called "homosocial" life in crowded dingy pubs had to stand in for wider society. 3. Flann O'Brien is a member of what Hugh Kenner called "Irish nihilism." There is no moral sense in the book, which after all begins with someone's head being crushed by a garden spade. This also supposedly explains the absence of contrition or any religious feeling. Denis Donoghue almost assents to this in his strange and covertly republican Afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition.4. Flann O'Brien is a minimalist, with deep ties to Beckett. This is one of the lines in Fintan O'Toole's 2009 review in the "New York Review of Books." The fact that these are all forced or unhelpful should probably indicate that the book is stranger than its commentators think. But the fact that people keep coming up with these one-line explanations shows how the novel keeps prodding its readers: it is just too strange to be accepted as a mid-century modernist novel, and for many readers a theory, no matter how artificial, helps soothe the discomfort. But what is the avant-garde, if it isn't a thing that is not anticipated? That can't be accommodated? That wasn't asked for, that solves no problem we ever thought we had?One thing I especially love about the "Third Policeman" is the sense of Irish landscape that it conjures, in between its many fantasies and concoctions. If you take away the hallucinated afterlife that occupies most of the book, what remains? A very poor, simple countryside, with farms and a few police stations and pubs, and miles of bumpy roads, sodden fields, muck, brambles, dripping copses, and gorse. There is almost nothing else: people ride bicycles everywhere. When they think they might become rich, they dream of changes of clothes. There is almost no mention of what they eat or drink. It is an impoverished landscape -- and in relation to it, O'Brien's perverse and perfervid inventions are even more desperate, more necessary, and more painful.

[schant-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On audiobook. Wierd and wonderful

[sanddancer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very bizarre book and one which I imagine will divide readers. It begins innocuously enough with a description of the narrator’s life following the death of his parents, and how he came to commit a murder. But this isn’t a straightforward tale of wrong-doings and things quickly become stranger. The rest of the book involves greed, guilt, eternity and bicycles!Absurd is the best way to describe the book, with the situations and dialogue taking surreal turns. Sometimes there is comedy in the absurdity, other times it is nightmarish, or just plain infuriating for the reader.Running alongside the actual “plot” (such as it is), is this book’s defining feature, its use of footnotes. The narrator has undertaken a project to collect together all the writings on a philosopher/scientist called de Selby and his thoughts (often quite tenuously) turn to the works of de Selby, so extensive footnotes are provided to explain the ideas of the man, and his numerous critics. Of course, de Selby is an entirely fictional character, but the author has created a whole body of work for him and his commentators. Although it was difficult to know how to read at the same time as the main novel, I enjoyed this part most because of the contrast between the ridiculousness of his theories and the serious academic tone of criticism.This book was very different from anything else I’ve ever read. I would recommend it to others just on that basis, but make guarantee that anyone will like or even understand it.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book operates on its own internal logic and is really hard to summarize as a result. In the beginning, the unnamed narrator - an orphan obsessed with the works of the (fictional) philosopher de Selby - is living with a man named Jack Divney who comes up with the idea of killing Old Mathers to fund the narrator's publishing of his critical work on said de Selby. They do so, and eventually Divney sends the narrator to Old Mathers' place to get the black box with money. In this cabin, he meets with Old Mathers, apparently alive again. From there, the oddities begin to pile up.Definitely the only book I've ever read that was made less comprehensible by looking up words I was unfamiliar with, _The Third Policeman_ is pretty bizarre and way outside of my reading comfort zone. I read it because of the references to it on the TV show "Lost," which is why I persevered to the end instead of stopping at page 30. That being said, I'm glad I pressed on because once I got to the end I completely reinterpreted the events of the story, and I thought what the author accomplishes with the story is interesting. Still, it's the sort of book you have to really think about and almost works better for a discussion or classroom than for pleasure reading.

[thebookjunky · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bizarrely good. An aura of strangeness tinged the first few pages, and then it intensified, and then there was a surreal tumble down the rabbit hole into a very curious world. A place where "...the trees were active where they stood." You need to "use your internal imagination".
Descriptions and events and expounded philosophies sort of made a weak and tenuous sense. The edge of sense. Until you realise it was making no sense at all and you were lost again. But then another promising thread of logic is offered and eagerly grasped. It only takes you deeper.

Some of the incidental descriptions of the land, the surroundings, were beautiful. "The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens. Birds were stirring and the great kingly trees were being pleasingly interfered with by the first breezes."
"The road...ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way."
Time and space are interchangeable. "... he led the way heavily into the middle of the morning." This is not logical, yet it makes sense.
Inanimate things don't become animated but they do assume a different essence, all explainable by the Atomic Theory. Which again made a weird sort of illogical sense.
"...you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is"

A delightful, bendy-mind kind of book that will take your brain out for a run, and then won't return it to the same spot.

[5hrdrive · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Such a strange book. Utterly surreal at times, complete nonsense mostly. However I do like MacCruiskeen a little, and it's good for a chuckle now and then.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

audio fiction (3.5+ hrs), A thief/murderer has a surreal dreamlike experience with the Irish police.I loved the narration (at 0.75 speed), it had terrific deadpan delivery; I wasn't able to follow the story as well due to my being easily distracted as well as the frequent digressions and nonsensical characters, but I enjoyed it. Reminds me a lot of Alice's adventures through the looking glass, with every character affected by his own unique madness.

[awssu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've worn out several copies of this just by reading it so often.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Like Joyce this book is more about structure than it is about plot. It's a whacky, weird tale within a tale within another tale. Don't worry what it's about or what's happening - just enjoy the way it unfolds.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very strange!