Flann O'Brien in Order: Where to Start with Ireland's Great Comic Novelist
O'Brien wrote under three names — Flann O'Brien for the novels, Myles na gCopaleen for the newspaper column, Brian O'Nolan on his civil service papers — and his best novel sat unpublished until after his death because a publisher rejected it in 1940. The shelf therefore makes no chronological sense at all. This path starts with the posthumous one.
Start here
IntermediateBegin with the novel he could not publish, which is the funniest and the most frightening.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: A week and a half. The Third Policeman is 200 pages and reads easily, which is the trap — the de Selby footnotes require a decision about how to read them, and the last twenty pages need a slow, undistracted sitting. About 20 pages a day, and do not read the ending late at night in a hurry.
- A narrator murders an old man for his money and walks into a countryside where the ordinary rules have been suspended: policemen preoccupied with bicycles, a police barracks that is not the right shape, an eternity reachable by lift.
- The atomic theory of bicycles — that people who ride constantly exchange atoms with their machines and gradually become part bicycle — is played entirely straight. The comedy works because nobody in the book finds it odd.
- De Selby is an invented philosopher, and the footnotes about him and his commentators run underneath the novel as a parallel comic text. They can be read as you go or in a block; deciding which is part of reading the book.
- The novel was rejected in 1940 and O'Brien told people the manuscript had been lost on a train. It was published in 1967, after his death, and is now the book he is known for.
- The ending recontextualises everything and is one of the few genuinely earned reversals in twentieth-century fiction. It is the reason this book, not the debut, is the entry point.
- The horror and the comedy are not alternating. They occupy the same sentences, which is the specific thing O'Brien could do that his imitators cannot.
- When did you first suspect what was wrong with the world the narrator has entered, and what gave it away?
- Are the de Selby footnotes part of the novel or a separate joke running beside it? Argue from a specific footnote.
- How does O'Brien make the bicycle theory funny rather than merely silly? What is the technique?
- Why is the narrator unnamed, and what does the ending do with that fact?
- Having finished, which scenes were frightening on a first reading and which only become frightening in retrospect?
- Choose deliberately, before chapter two, whether to read the footnotes in place or save them. Then switch method halfway and see which produced the better book — the novel is one of the few that makes this a real question.
- Mark the point at which you stopped expecting a realistic explanation. Note the page; it is the hinge of the whole reading experience.
- After the last page, reread the first chapter. It is short, and it is a different chapter the second time.
- Write down what the ending implies about the chronology of the events you have just read. Getting this straight matters, because The Dalkey Archive in a later stage reuses the material and will muddle it if you have not.
Next up: You now know how strange he is at his most controlled; the debut is stranger, harder and less controlled, and needs that preparation.
A murderer wanders into a countryside where policemen are turning into bicycles and the laws of physics have been replaced by footnotes to an invented philosopher. Rejected in 1940, published in 1967 after his death, and now the book he is known for.
The famous one
IntermediateMove to the debut, which is harder and more admired.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Three weeks. At Swim-Two-Birds is 315 pages and it is a genuine effort — it opens three times, closes three times, and switches between a student's Dublin, a cowboy novel, and the Middle Irish Sweeny poems without transitions. About 15 pages a day, and read the Sweeny sections aloud.
- A student is writing a novel about a novelist, Dermot Trellis, whose characters resent him and drug him so that he sleeps while they get on with their own lives. Then one of them writes a novel to take revenge on him.
- The novel announces at the start that a book may have three openings and three endings, and then does exactly that. The joke is that the framework is stated plainly and still disorients.
- Finn MacCool, a cowboy outfit operating in Dublin, the Pooka and the Good Fairy, and a poet-king turned into a bird all share the same book. O'Brien is putting Irish mythology, pulp westerns and student life on one plane deliberately.
- The Sweeny material is translated from Buile Suibhne, a genuine Middle Irish text. It is the most beautiful writing in the book and it is not O'Brien's invention, which matters.
- Joyce admired it and Beckett handed him a copy. It is the book that gives O'Brien his reputation as a modernist rather than as a comic novelist, and it is the harder claim to sustain.
- It is more admired than loved. Being honest with yourself about which sections you enjoyed and which you endured is a legitimate outcome of reading it.
- What are the three openings and where does each one resume? Keep track — the novel expects you to.
- Why do the characters rebel, and what is O'Brien saying about authorship by having them drug their author?
- What do the Sweeny passages do to the tone of the surrounding comedy? Would the book be poorer without them?
- Is the student narrator's Dublin the real level of the novel, or just another fiction?
- Which is the better book, this or The Third Policeman, and what standard are you applying?
- Keep one page listing the levels — student, Trellis, Trellis's characters, the characters' own novel — and note which one you are in at the top of each section. Without this the middle third is a fog.
- Read a Sweeny passage aloud. The verse is doing something the prose cannot, and it does not register silently.
- Mark every point where the student's own frame narrative interrupts. Count them; the distribution shows how carefully the apparent chaos was arranged.
- Write one honest paragraph on which sections you actually enjoyed. This is the book on which readers most often pretend, and the path is better served by your real answer.
Next up: Both experiments are behind you, which is exactly the position from which the two lifetime-published novels can be read for what they are.
A student writes a novel about a novelist whose characters rebel against him, with Finn MacCool and a cowboy in Dublin. Joyce admired it; Beckett gave a copy to Joyce. It is a genuine effort to read and worth it.
The later novels
IntermediateThe two books he published in his lifetime after the debut.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Two weeks. The Hard Life is 159 pages and can be read in two sittings. The Dalkey Archive is 222 and should be read second and only after The Third Policeman — about a week. Do not reverse this order.
- The Hard Life is short, sour and much more conventional than anything else here: Dublin poverty, a boy and his brother, a guardian and a Jesuit, and a subtitle calling itself an exercise in exorcism.
- It is the one book in this path that a reader could mistake for an ordinary comic novel, which makes it useful as a control. The gap between it and The Third Policeman is the measure of what the strangeness was worth.
- The Dalkey Archive cannibalises The Third Policeman directly — de Selby returns, and so does the theory about bicycles and their riders — because O'Brien assumed the earlier novel would never be published.
- This is why the reading order is not negotiable. Meeting the material here first spoils the better book permanently.
- The Dalkey Archive also has James Joyce alive, denying he wrote Ulysses, working as a barman and hoping to join the Jesuits. It is O'Brien's most direct comment on the writer he was always measured against.
- Both books are lesser, and saying so is not a reason to skip them. They show a comic writer working inside constraints — a newspaper man's schedule, a dwindling health, a market — rather than in free invention.
- What is being exorcised in The Hard Life, and does the book perform it?
- Which passages of The Dalkey Archive are lifted from The Third Policeman, and are they better or worse in their new setting?
- What is O'Brien doing with Joyce as a character — homage, revenge, or something less settled?
- The Hard Life is his most conventional novel. Is it also his weakest, and are those the same question?
- What do these two books tell you about the twenty-year gap between the early novels and them?
- Read The Dalkey Archive with a note of every element you recognise from The Third Policeman. The list is the point of putting the two books in this order.
- Take the Joyce chapters on their own and set them against the fact that Joyce praised At Swim-Two-Birds. Write a paragraph on what the joke costs O'Brien.
- Compare a page of The Hard Life with a page of At Swim-Two-Birds for sentence length and vocabulary. He can write plainly; the earlier books were a choice.
- After both, rank the four novels and write one line of justification each. You now have enough to make the ranking mean something.
Next up: The novels are done, and the column is what he actually did for a living for twenty-six years — which many Irish readers consider the main body of work.
A short, sour comedy of Dublin poverty and Jesuits, subtitled an exercise in exorcism. Much more conventional than the other novels.
He cannibalised The Third Policeman for this one, since he assumed it would never appear — so read it after, or the reuse will spoil the better book. It also has James Joyce alive and working as a barman.
The journalism
IntermediateFinish with the column, which many Irish readers rate above the novels.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Indefinite, and by design. The Best of Myles is 400 pages of newspaper columns and reading it straight through flattens the jokes. Two or three columns a sitting, over a month or more; it is a book to keep on a table rather than to finish.
- Cruiskeen Lawn ran in the Irish Times for twenty-six years under the name Myles na gCopaleen, while its author was a civil servant called Brian O'Nolan and a novelist called Flann O'Brien. Three names, three jobs, one man.
- The Plain People of Ireland interrupt the columnist to complain, ask stupid questions and demand explanations. The columnist's readership is written into the column as an antagonist.
- The Keats and Chapman stories exist solely to deliver a pun in the last line, and the elaborateness of the setup relative to the payoff is the entire joke.
- The invented enterprises — the book-handling service that will crease and annotate your unread library to order, the escort bureau, the research bureau — are sustained bureaucratic parodies of a kind the novels never attempt.
- This is comic invention produced daily, under deadline, for a quarter of a century. It is the strongest evidence of how his mind actually worked, as opposed to what he could shape into a book.
- Many Irish readers rate the column above the novels. Having read four novels first, you are now in a position to have an opinion on that rather than to defer to one.
- What do the Plain People of Ireland allow him to do that a straight column could not?
- Is a Keats and Chapman story funny, or only admirable? Be honest about the distinction.
- Which of the invented bureaux is the best sustained, and what makes a bureaucratic parody work?
- What does daily production do to comedy — what kinds of joke does it favour and which does it make impossible?
- Do you now rate the column above the novels? What would have to be true for that to be the right judgement?
- Read three columns a day for a fortnight rather than reading the book. That is the delivery schedule the material was written for, and it changes the hit rate noticeably.
- Pick a single running feature — the book-handling service, or Keats and Chapman — and read only its instalments in sequence. The accumulation is a different effect from the individual columns.
- Find a passage in the column whose comic method also appears in one of the four novels, and name the shared technique. The overlap is real and is the argument for reading the journalism at all.
- Write a paragraph placing the three names — Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan — against the work you have now read. The division of labour between them is the shape of the whole career.
- Go back to the last page of The Third Policeman one final time. Having spent a month with the columnist, the novelist's ending reads as the work of a man who did this for a living every day.
Next up: This closes the path: the posthumous masterpiece, the difficult debut, the two lifetime novels and the newspaper column that ran alongside all of it.
Selections from the Cruiskeen Lawn column he wrote in the Irish Times for twenty-six years. Sustained comic invention at newspaper length, and the best evidence of how strange his mind was day to day.