Christopher's Reviews > The Third Policeman

It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an 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; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation.

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman continuously defied my expectations. Before reading, I had no preconceived notions about it, other than that it was an influence on the TV show LOST, but from its beginning pages, I hypothesized it to be a short, clever novel about murder. That's the only thing I got right about this book. When I thought it was a tale of an obsessive friendship, it became a philosophical examination of death. Then it became a trip down Alice's rabbit hole. Then it became a farcical look at science. Then it made several left turns and U-turns and roundabouts that I'll let the reader discover for herself.

This book feels vastly important, mostly because it's really old. It was written in 1940. That's a long time before David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which has a similar hysterical-realistic aesthetic. It's a long time before Paul Auster infused his The New York Trilogy with a healthy dose of O'Brien's metafiction. That's even before Borges' Ficciones or Beckett's Waiting for Godot made their marks on postmodernism. And being so old, The Third Policeman feels remarkably modern in every sense other than its usage of old Britishisms like using "stone" as a unit of measure.

I know this is a short review, but I don't know what else to say. It's hard to talk about this book without giving anything away and I think it should come as a complete surprise to the reader. It's an important book which I don't think has received its just deserts. Read it.