It’s already been mentioned elsewhere, but it’s a busy weekend, with STML planning on celebrating an important anniversary by falling asleep on, in or under a number of bars, so we’ll just have to go on and on about The Third Policeman like everybody else.

Apparently, the book is due to be “prominently featured” in the next series of Lost, which I am reliably informed is a kind of serial for the televisual apparatus (the latter being one of the many, many things STML lacks but does not lose sleep over).

The Third Policeman is an astounding novel, and possibly one of the hardest known books to summarise. It concerns a man, who wakes up in a place, and there’s some policemen, who are obsessed with bicycles, and he’s an academic, or something, in turn obsessed with a philosopher called de Selby, who believes that night is caused by accretions of black air, like smoke… It is definitely a murder mystery, whose intent is stated on the first page but which is not resolved until the final lines, it is also a meditation on crime and punishment, a philosophical enquiry into the nature of truth and scientific discourse, a reimagining of Einsteinian phusics, and a treatise on the correct use of the bicycle, with special attention paid to the relative merits of the pad versus the disc braking system. In short, unclassifiable. Also, hilarious. Once read, it is not easily forgotten.

However, the book was not always seen in this light. In 1940 it was rejected by O’Brien’s publisher, Longman, who had successfully published his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds. Their rejection stated: “We realize the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this new novel he is more so.” Fools. Despite being plundered for material for the later, and much inferior, The Dalkey Archive, the full manuscript was finally published, tragically posthumously, in 1967.

But this is only part of the story. “Flann O’Brien” was merely the best known pseudonym of Brian O’Nolan, journalist, satirist, humorist and devotee of Joyce (which makes him only the second greatest Irishman in history – but still the funniest). O’Nolan also went by the name Myles na gCopaleen, under which name he published a regular column entitled “Cruiskeen Lawn” in The Irish Times. “Cruiskeen Lawn” was written originally entirely in Irish without English, then alternated between the two, and finally stabilised in English with Latin, Greek, German and combinations of all four. O’Nolan originally got the column by starting a series of literary arguments with himself in the letters pages of The Times, and fighting them out from behind a wall of pseudonyms. The editor, after indulging this for some time, tracked him down and offered him a job.

The resulting columns are masterpieces of humorous writing introducing his readers to the likes of “the brother”, “the da”, The Myles na gCopaleen Research Bureau (a dig at various Irish institutions), the Plain People of Ireland (a dig at pretty much everybody) and Keats and Chapman, two roving poets who’s shaggy dog adventures always ended in an appalling pun.

In honour of Brian O’Nolan’s would-be 94th birthday on October 5th, STML will from Monday until Flannday (possibly excluding, but not exclusively so, weekends) post daily excerpts from Myles na gCopaleen’s collected works, which are ill-represented on the interweb. Come back soon to enjoy the fruits of Myles, and remember: forewarned is four-armed.

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Extract 1: My Claim
Extract 2: Keats and All That
Extract 3: The Drinking Laws
Extract 4: Trink
Extract 5: Keatsiana
Extract 6: The Catechism of Cliché
Extract 7: More Keatsiana
Extract 8: Miscellaneous (& Competition)

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