The Third Policeman
SynopsisPlot
A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt, ‘The Third Policeman’ is comparable only to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ as an allegory of the absurd.Distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy, ‘The Third Policeman’ is unique in the English language.
Story
About this book
The Third Policeman is a novel by Flann O'Brien, the pen name of Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, completed around 1940 but not published until 1967, after his death. The story follows an unnamed narrator who, after committing a murder for money, finds himself in a strange rural parish governed by two eccentric policemen obsessed with bicycles and a mysterious third policeman no one has met. What begins as a crime story quickly shifts into something far stranger, as the narrator encounters impossible architecture, a police barracks filled with inexplicable inventions, and a theory that people and their bicycles gradually exchange atoms through prolonged contact.
The novel draws on the invented philosophy of a fictional scholar named de Selby, whose footnoted theories on topics like darkness, mirrors, and the nature of houses interrupt the narrative at regular intervals. These academic digressions parody real scholarly writing while adding layers of absurdity to an already disorienting plot. The setting feels both ordinary and impossible, a countryside that operates according to its own internal logic.
O'Brien wrote the book under the shadow of his earlier novel At Swim-Two-Birds. Unable to find a publisher during his lifetime, he reportedly told friends the manuscript had been lost. The novel became widely known only after its posthumous release.
