"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 A wonderful novel, a sort of cross between Ulysses by James Joyce and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The unnamed narrator, a disciple of a crackpot philosopher whose works are critiqued in a series of footnotes, murders a man in the first paragraph and seeks the box containing his money. He then meets the dead man, then the king of one-legged men, and finally a number of policemen who are obsessed with bicycles. 

The reader is swept along through this apparently ridiculous story (there is a rationale which is revealed in the final pages) by the most wonderfully lyrical prose.

I've been looking out for something different in the way of fiction and this is surrealism at its best.

Selected quotes: (I could have picked loads more!)

• "I was born a long time ago." (Ch 1)
• "It ... was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win." (Ch 1)
• "Something happened ... It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in the instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye." (Ch 2)
• "Never before has I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I also knew that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare." (Ch 2)
• "The live right hand had gripped the pot of tea, raised it very awkwardly and slapped a filling into the empty cup." (Ch 2)
• "It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated ... while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena." (Ch 4)
• "Nearly every sickness is from the teeth." (Ch 4)
• "Your talk ... is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand." (Ch 6)
• "You are as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jog on top of a tombstone." (Ch 6)
• "Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed." (Ch 6)
• "It was a gloomy light and looked exactly as if there was a small area somewhere on the mangle and was merely devoid of darkness." (Ch 7)
• "Omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export." (Ch 7)
• "He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable exactitudes." (Ch 10)
• "It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable." (Ch 10)
• "She now seemed to rest beneath my friendly eyes like a tame fowl which will crouch submissively, awaiting with out-hunched wings the caressing hand." (Ch 11)
• "'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked." (Ch 12)

October 2022; 206 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here. This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God