Third Policeman (Paperback)

O'Brien spins an incredibly imaginative, voluble, funny, inventive yarn. Our nameless protagonist meets policemen, visits eternity, and develops a relationship with a bicycle. His soul, Joe, enjoys proclaiming that he (the protagonist) is "Signor Bari, the eminent one-legged tenor!"

The protagonist is a literally amoral person. In other words, he is not troubled by any dilemmas other than how best to preserve his own hide (and possibly to publish his work on bogus savant de Selby.) His role in this book is not to simulate a real person, in other words. Like Gulliver, he observes O'Brien's world and in reacting to that world, acts as a proxy for the reader. But more on that below.

Having committed a self-serving though impulsive murder, he begins to meet odd people and have odd conversations. He meets a curiously circumlocutory policeman, and after a mind-bending conversation, he begins to talk in similarly loopy style, in a hilarious attempt to fit in: "Those chests... are so like one another that I do not believe they are there at all because that is a simpler thing to believe than the contrary."

O'Brien displays amazing virtuosity with the English language, especially considering it is his second language (his first is Irish.) And yet his characters talk in a (to my untravelled ear) a peculiarly, and hilariously, Irish way: "Only myself has the secret of the thing and the intimate way of it, the confidential knack of circumventing it." But there are also passages of limpid beauty

But what is he making fun of? Self-obsessed scholars and their exegetists, undoubtedly. But there are also themes of punishment and guilt, both felt and adjudicated. After a few hours of consideration, I might hazard that O'Brien is making fun of, and cherishing, greed, selfishness and the desperate desire to avoid justice. When visiting eternity the protagonist discovers he can have literally anything, so he requests and receives bricks of gold, jewels, small but frightful weapons, etc.; he generally displays venality and defensiveness. When it turns out he cannot bring any of it with him, he bursts into tears. When a policeman sympathetically offers him a piece of candy, he cries even harder.

So although the protagonist is amoral, the book is basically a morality play. In fact it turns out that the entire book is a long description of the hapless protagonist's comeuppance. O'Brien's Catholic upbringing shows through, I suppose. Humanity's lot is justly a poor one, yet one cannot blame them for longing for better. Perhaps it is just best to have a sad whiskey.