Flann O'Brien's Bombshells: At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien's Bombshells:

At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman

During the approach to World War II, Brian O'Nolan wrote two novels in English under the pen-name Flann O'Brien, both of which are closely connected with bombs. The first of these, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), sold few copies and got lukewarm reviews; it could be said to have bombed. The following year Longman's premises in London were destroyed by a real bomb, and with them the remaining stocks of O'Nolan's book; after that it disappeared from public consciousness until it was reprinted in 1960.¹ His second novel, The Third Policeman, finished in 1940, ends with a revelation that might be described as a bombshell. In the last pages of the book the narrator makes the shocking discovery that he has been blown to bits by a booby trap and that he has been telling his tale from beyond the grave. On being offered to the publishers, this novel did more than bomb: it was rejected, and did not see print until after O'Brien's death in 1966.²

The link between these two bombs—the real one that destroyed the first edition of At Swim-Two-Birds and the fictitious one in The Third Policeman—may be a brittle one, but it seems worth forging. Setting them side by side helps to underscore the extent to which O'Brien's fiction is bound up with violence, and the extent to which the imaginary violence it contains has a grounding in reality. The independent Ireland of which At Swim-Two-Birds is an ambiguous celebration was built on armed conflict, and by the time the novel was published armed conflict was rapidly spreading throughout Europe. It is hardly surprising, then, that comedy for O'Brien is an often physically painful art form, with its roots in an oppressive past and its branches spreading into an equally oppressive potential time to come. His two great novels in English were written in a nation that comically declared its neutrality at a time when neutrality was impossible.³ They are full of belligerently partisan characters who are obsessed with the peripheral and the absurd; and lurking in the background of both is the cataclysmic joke of an impending war from which Ireland stands aside, whose imminence is having a direct effect on the Irish present, and whose outcome will have an incalculable effect on the Irish future. The laughter these novels elicit is as explosive as the situation on the European continent, which they, like O'Brien's country, so studiously contrive to ignore.⁴

O'Brien's consciousness that violence is the presiding genius of his time finds its most direct expression in the ruthlessness with which he kills off his narrators. By the time he booby-trapped the narrator of The Third Policeman, he had made himself an expert in the arts of character assassination and "author-nasia." Much of At Swim-Two-Birds concerns the efforts of the fictional characters in a novel to outwit and finally execute the writer who claims authority over them. And at the end of the book, this cast of revolutionary characters—all of whom collaborate in composing a portion of the text they inhabit, so that they can be called a kind of collective author—is massacred at one fell swoop, when the pages that sustain their existence are burned by the writer's servant. The moral of all this wanton destruction? It is a dangerous thing in O'Brien's universe to strive to exert authorial control over a diversity of discourses or disparate social groups—such as are to be found, for instance, in a modern novel or a modern nation. And it is yet more dangerous to strive to coordinate or reconcile them in a democratic fashion. At Swim-Two-Birds and...