"At Swim-Two-Birds" by Flann O'Brien

The key to unlock this labyrinthine but ultimately rewarding book is to realise that it is meta-fiction. In the very first paragraph, the narrator (a student, living with his disapproving uncle, a clerk at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin) discusses his “spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” So he gives three beginnings (of course, there is a fourth beginning, because the book has already begun, with the narrator!):

• About “Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class”.
• About John Furriskey, the character in a book written, we will later learn, by Dermot Trellis, who is himself a character in stories told by the narrator.
• About Finn Mac Cool, the “legendary hero of old Ireland”, a the subject of many stories, who will go on, after a lot of prevarication, to tell a story about mad King Sweeney.

The book ends with a discussion of madness, which seems appropriate, and the formula “good-bye, good-bye, good-bye”; so there are three endings to go with the three beginnings.

There are stories within stories. At one point we have a story about someone called Bartley being told by someone who is a character (Shanahan) in a story told by a character (Trellis) in a story told by a character (the student) in a story told by the author.

The characters take on a life of their own, interacting, and conspiring to drug the author so he sleeps so that they can live ‘normal’ lives without the author making them do things that they don’t want to do. And towards the end the characters decide to revenge themselves of the author so that one of them writes the story of Trellis being tortured and then put on trial by the characters; he only escapes when his maid, making up the fire in his bedroom, burns the manuscript pages that give life to the rebellious characters.

No wonder it’s confusing!

The narrative moves up and down the levels. It pokes fun of literary conventions (one character complains that although he has been provided with outer clothing he was given no underpants and therefore caught pneumonia; another character is born as a twenty-five year old man) and figures of speech (litotes, synecdoche, anadiplosis and anaphora). As a sort of homage to (or possibly satire on) James Joyce’s Ulysses, several literary styles and genres are used (including different sorts of poetry); the characters repeatedly prefer everyday styles (eg westerns are preferred to Irish myth, even though both may be about cattle rustling). There are foreshadowing and echoes; for example, Finn Mac Cool (a character written about by the student who is written about by the author), who is a figure from Irish myth, tells a story about mad King Sweeny who perches in trees and when Trellis is punished by his characters he is made to roost in a tree.

These foreshadowings and others are considered by Gallagher 1992 [Reflecting Mirrors in Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" by Monique Gallagher in The Journal of Narrative Technique , Spring, 1992, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 128-135 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225357] as part of a profusion of mirrorings reminiscent of Bach or Escher; others Gallagher suggests are the indifference of the narrator as the pages of Trellis's manuscript are burnt, destroying his characters, reflecting the indifference of Nero as Rome burns; and the multiple duplications, including the joke that is repeated twice and the triple openings of both the student's story and Orlick's story.

It’s very clever and there are moments of beautiful writing. I particularly enjoyed the discussion between Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan which was a sort of conversation through free association which ranged from death by drowning to Hemlock to Homer to the persecution of the Christians to blindness to harpists to blackheads and pimples and boils. You can hear these three Irishman in the pub, arguing and discussing and getting things wrong.

Another great set piece is when Shanahan recounts a story in the western genre, with all the vernacular, about he and his mates trying to reclaim rustled cattle and holding up a train etc. In the course of this story the cattle rustler at prayer is likened to Brian Boru who was the founder of the O’Brien dynasty (from whom Flann O’Brien had taken part of his pseudonym) and a King of Munster and subsequently High King of all Ireland, a warrior who died defeating the Vikings (who founded Dublin) at the Battle of Clontarf (a seaside resort north of Dublin whose name means ‘Meadow of the Bull’, where James Joyce lived when he was young); the resemblance seems appropriate because many of the exploits of legendary Irish heroes seem to have been glorified cattle rustling.

There are so many in-jokes. Two characters who appear are called “Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes” (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes = “I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts” is a famous line from the Aeneid). There is a wonderfully bad-tempered Good Fairy.

From time to time the frame story intrudes in which the student (who lives with his somewhat censorious uncle) lies in bed, goes to college, goes to the pub and gets drunk, is violently ill, and then goes back home to lie in bed again.

There’s part of me that wants to know what it all means. Great literature, I tell myself, should have a purpose. But does it ever? Is there a purpose for Ulysses? Presumably the work of Wodehouse is intended to make people laugh, to entertain. Is At Swim-Two-Birds no more than a prolonged joke? What is the point of it?

McMullen 1993 [Culture as Colloquy: Flann O'Brien's Postmodern Dialogue with Irish Tradition by Kim McMullen in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Autumn, 1993, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp.

62-84 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345981] points out that O'Brien was a member of the first generation that reached adulthood in the new Irish Free State and that the establishment of the time was trying to revivie the Irish language as part of a programme to redefine an Irish identity. McMullen argues that O'Brien was reacting against the monocular vision of Irishness promoted by the Roman Catholic church and other conservatives ideologies by showing that a language is an conglomeration of different influences; hence his incorporation of a variety of texts, from a racing tipster to early Irish epics, from mediaeval nature poetry to the pub jungles of the Workingman's Poet, and that "none of these discourses is privileged; none has the last word". 

Swim-Two-Birds is the rough translation of an Irish placename where there is a church which mad King Sweeny reportedly visited. I'm not sure whether that explains the title of the book.

The selected quotes include some wonderful observations of human behaviour, moments of original and beautiful description

Selected quotes:

There are no chapters so I have used page references for the 1967 Penguin Modern Classics edition.

• "I know the studying you do in your bedroom, said my uncle. Damn the studying you do in your bedroom." (p 11)
• "I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in a lake-top. Also the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing." (p 14)
• "The chest to him was ... pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat." (p 14)
• "The mind may be impaired with alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired." (p 22)
• "On we slithered with as much sound out if us as an eel in a barrel of tripes." (p 56)
• "Shut the door, said Shanahan, but see you're in the room before you do so." (p 62)
• "He swallowed a draught of vesper-milk, restoring the cloudy glass swiftly to his knee and collecting little belated flavourings from the corners of his mouth." (p 72)
• "His laugh had a dual function, partly to applaud his jest, partly to cloak his anger." (p 93)
• "The idea that all spirits are accomplished instrumentalists is a popular fallacy, said the Good Fairy in a cold voice, just as it is wrong to assume that they all have golden tempers." (p 116)
• "Give the word, said Shorty with a waving menace of his hand, or it's gunplay and gravestones." (p 118)
• "He was as blind as the back of your neck." (p 156)
• "You can steam your face till your snot melts but damn the good it will do to your blackheads if you don't attend to your inside." (p 157)
• "Be damned but he wouldn't die. I'll live, says he, I'll live if it kills me, says he." (p 158)
• "To say which of them is worst, that would require a winter in a web of thought." (p 175)
• "To fly ... towards the east to discover the seam between night and day, that is an aesthetic delight" (p 180)
• "The gift of flight without the sister-art of landing ... is always a doubt." (p 180)

Similar works reviewed in this blog include:

• Lanark by Alasdair Gray: a surreal work with a clear element of meta-fiction
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the grand-daddy of them all
• The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan
• Road-Kill  The Duchess of Frisian Tull by Pete Adams

Flann O'Brien also wrote The Third Policeman

July 2023; 218 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God