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Steve's Reviews > The Third Policeman
The Third Policeman
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‘Tis an odd little book, this one, with elements of the supernatural mixed with wry observations and assorted bits of absurdity. It was written by Irishman Brian O’Nolan under the pen name Flann O’Brien back in 1940, but wasn’t published until after his death in 1967. Since I’ve never read anything like it, I don’t quite know how to compare it. If pressed, though, I’d say it’s like James Joyce for the lilt, Camus for the angst, and Lewis Carroll for the false logic. The most enjoyable parts for me were from the realm of pseudo-science. The principal character and narrator, who never gave his name, met a group of policemen down in what amounted to Alice’s rabbit hole. One of the officers was a master craftsman of infinitesimals. For instance, he had a lance with such a sharp point that you could feel it stick you before you could see it touch your skin. In another fun distortion of science, the policeman gets us all to agree that the image you see in the mirror is an ever-so-slightly younger version of yourself given travel times of light. Therefore, if you have a mirror reflecting an opposite mirror which itself has an image of the first mirror, and the mutual reflections continue on and on, you can see arbitrarily far back in time.
The temptation in reviewing this story is to give away the same spoiler that the egghead/bonehead who wrote the introduction did. I would urge you to either skip the intro to this edition, or read it afterwards. I’ll mention a somewhat smaller spoiler instead. Much of the story is set in a kind of wackadoo hell; one where just deserts are applied.
My new habit with stars is to round down. Maybe I’m reaching a stingier age. Or it could be that a recent spate of really good books has lifted my bar. This one gets 3.5 for its offbeat entertainment value, but falls short of full marks since any of the life themes that might have been given some heft instead floated off, into the fictive ether.
The temptation in reviewing this story is to give away the same spoiler that the egghead/bonehead who wrote the introduction did. I would urge you to either skip the intro to this edition, or read it afterwards. I’ll mention a somewhat smaller spoiler instead. Much of the story is set in a kind of wackadoo hell; one where just deserts are applied.
My new habit with stars is to round down. Maybe I’m reaching a stingier age. Or it could be that a recent spate of really good books has lifted my bar. This one gets 3.5 for its offbeat entertainment value, but falls short of full marks since any of the life themes that might have been given some heft instead floated off, into the fictive ether.
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June 23, 2011
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Susan
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Jul 03, 2011 12:15PM
This might have been somewhat interesting to me, given my heritage, but since you weren't in love with it, I'm going to cop out yet again and move on to something else. In any case, this one seems a bit too quirky for me. I seem to have advanced beyond the point where I'll read anything I can get my hands on, but not you!
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Yea, this one had its good points, but I doubt it's your cuppa tea. It wasn't entirely mine either, but it had such enthusiastic fans I figured it was worth a try. You bring up a good point about being choosy in the face of finite reading time. I'm coming to grips with that, too, which makes my current book of choice, Infinite Jest, somewhat ironic, doesn't it?
When I was a kid I would read whatever was lying around the house, which meant that I read Exodus as a 13 year old and The Godfather at 15. I have no idea who brought The Godfather into the house, though! My dad?! Since it's so much easier to get exactly what one wants these days--between library, Amazon, Sandmeyers, Andersons, Kindle--I can afford to be really picky. As are you! Although, come to think of it, you happened to find Infinite Jest at the train station, right? So you're reading something that you just happened to lay hands on!
I guess you're right, technically. Though recall that you had turned me on to DFW and his tennis essay before the time I scavenged the Share-a-Book shelf at the station.You were always a very precocious reader. At the age of 13 the only semi-adult themes I was confronting were those a certain knuckle-baller from the post-mythologized era in baseball set forth in his exposé.
Ball Four...is that even semi-adult? I mean, spying on women in various states of undress from hotel rooftops...isn't that what 13 year old boys do?
Are you forgetting the professional angst that a man in a prolonged contract dispute must feel, the peripatetic nature of forced trades (non-voluntary transfers), and the quandary saddling these men who are keenly aware of the value of small advantages all the while that they’re assessing the costs and benefits of greenie abuse? And what about the agonizing search-of-the-soul that Bouton must have done before exposing true icons of the game for their 13-year-old-boy-like behavior? But then when I think about what knuckleheads these guys were, I see your point.
Words like angst and quandary and concepts like cost-benefit analysis seem almost preposterous in any discussion of Ball Four. Knuckleheads, on the other hand, does not.
Oh no! Spoiler intros are the WORST. I mean, in certain books I guess it makes sense, such as new translations of a classic that even if you haven't read, you likely know the story, but a less-known one like this should NOT be ruined! Then again, I blame the intro to Anna Karenina for not having read it yet, as in the first paragraph it told the ending.
But you will forget the heavy foreshadowing in the intro to Anna Karenina by the time you are just a few pages into it. There are plenty of characters and subplots and then there's the way in which poor Anna goes from Point A to Point B...predictable, but well-told.
Spenky, I think what my dear, well-read better half is telling you is to read Anna Karenina. I know you have a taste for Russian lit (though maybe not the bandwidth given your long list of other books vying for your attention).And thanks for weighing in, Susan! Young Mr. Penkevich is worth guiding well.
I wouldn't dream of trying to guide any of your scholarly literary friends about anything, LOL. My review of Anna would go something like this: "AK was a very good book. You should read it. Even if you know what happens at the end."As anyone can see, I'm not your better half! Better tenth? Twentieth?
You're too modest by a factor of 20 or even 40, Susan. Besides, even though friends like the Spenkmeister are literary and scholarly, they seem nice enough not to want to expose guys like me for being shams.
Sham? Wow...you mean he doesn't know that you are in fact a math guy--a statistician, to be precise--not someone who majored in English and who now works in publishing? Or some other interesting line of work where lucky people who like books get paid to...be around books?The truth is out!
Susan wrote: "But you will forget the heavy foreshadowing in the intro to Anna Karenina by the time you are just a few pages into it. There are plenty of characters and subplots and then there's the way in whic..."True, true, I've always meant to read it, especially since Nabokov cites it as the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy is wonderful, and I mean, I went into Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment knowing the ending and still came out on the other side declaring it my favorite novel, so the intro is a weak excuse at best to mask my
Steve, the only sham is your belief in being a sham! haha.
Susan: While it doesn't actually pay anything, hanging around Goodreads is at least a way that book amateurs like me can get a good fix.Spenky: Sounds like you really should be reading AK ASAP, IMHO. A metasham, am I? Well, thank you. :-)
Susan wrote: "Sham? Wow...you mean he doesn't know that you are in fact a math guy--a statistician, to be precise--not someone who majored in English and who now works in publishing? Or some other interesting ..."Ha, see, it's his expertise on math that makes me feel inadequate! All my english degree got me so far was a job at Barnes and Nobel saying 'oh yes, James Patterson has a new one coming out this month. And next month, and pretty much all the months after that.'
Spenky wrote: 'oh yes, James Patterson has a new one coming out this month. And next month, and pretty much all the months after that.' Haha! At least the co-authors seem to vary. Is that right?
That's true. Funny how nobody ever says 'wow, I really like the books by [insert co-author]' though, he gets all the credit. I suppose a better example though is all the ummms and uhhhs that spew out to indicate my poorly underfed mathematical portion of the brain when someone, for instance, asks 'so this book is 36.95, I have a 10% discount and a coupon for 25% off my total, and I want to get this book that is 14.99, how much is all that?'. Half the time I want to say, 'I'm pretty sure that iphone you are using to show me your coupon has a calculator...'
s.penkevich wrote: "Susan wrote: "Sham? Wow...you mean he doesn't know that you are in fact a math guy--a statistician, to be precise--not someone who majored in English and who now works in publishing? Or some othe..."Yes of course, that's the main purpose of math expertise: to make the rest of us feel inadequate! But Steve doesn't actually do that, he is quite nice when I say something rebellious, such as, "Who cares why 1/4 divided by 1/3 = 3/4? I'll just teach our daughter the cookbook rule and she'll get it right on the test! That's all that matters, duh!"
Well, Barnes & Noble sounds good to me. Not quite as good as The Little Bookshop around the Corner, or whatever Meg Ryan's place was in You've Got Mail. That's the dream job, or more like "in your dreams" job these days. At least B & N (aka "Fox Books"), is still in business, unlike Meg's shop. And you never know, you might get to assist a disguised mathematician who's searching for DFW essays or out-there stuff by that Pynchon guy.
Spenky wrote: 'so this book is 36.95, I have a 10% discount and a coupon for 25% off my total, and I want to get this book that is 14.99, how much is all that?'Oh, but it's all so easy if you first convert to logarithms. (Sorry, I'm messing with you here.) I'm sure the staff gets questions like that all too often.
The crucial question is, how much of an employee discount do you get? In any case, I hope they end up owing you more than you owe them in any given pay period.
Susan wrote: "Not quite as good as The Little Bookshop around the Corner, or whatever Meg Ryan's place was in You've Got Mail. That's the dream job, or more like "in your dreams" job these days. At least B & N (aka "Fox Books"), is still in business, unlike Meg's shop."I could easily picture you there, Susan. That Hanks guy better keep his distance, though. Same goes for Greg Kinnear. I'll smack them with a copy of IJ if they try to steal you away.
Funny how in the space of a few years we've gone from pulling for the little independent booksellers to any bookseller that still physically exists.
The most enjoyable parts for me were from the realm of pseudo-science. O'Brien also wrote fake advertisements, some of which use pseudo-science. There was one for a teapot which only used half the amount of tea; it had a mesh screen down the center and you put the half-measure of tea on one side. But the water doesn't know the screen is there! It goes through to both halves of the teapot and you get a full pot of tea!
Apparently many people tried to buy this, as well as the book-marking service.
Haha, great example of O'Brien's pseudo-scientific proclivities and the public's naivete. Too funny, Miriam!
I used to make jokes like that, but too many people believed me. Science ignorance is distressing! Don't people want to know how the world works?
Not to brag, but we always took the inscription on the statue at Faber College to heart -- the one they show at the beginning of Animal House: Knowledge is Good.
