The Third Policeman (1940, published 1967) by Flann O'Brien

Irish comic writer Flann O'Brien was best-known for his newspaper columns, written under the name Myles na Gopaleen. The Third Policeman is, I believe, his only novel, published posthumously, and is "one of the most unusual novels in the English language, comparable only to Alice in Wonderland as an allegory of the absurd." That's the blurb on the cover, anyway ; but hey, it sounds about right.

(pp. 57-60)

"Is it about a bicycle?" he asked.

His expression when I encountered it was unexpectedly reassuring. His face was gross and far from beautiful but he had modified and assembled his various unpleasant features in some skilful way so that they expressed to me good nature, politeness and infinite patience. In the front of his peaked official cap was an important-looking badge and over it in golden letters was the word SERGEANT. It was Sergeant Pluck himself.

"No," I answered, stretching forth my hand to lean with it against the counter. The Sergeant looked at me incredulously.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Certain."

"Not about a motor-cycle?"

"No."

"One with overhead valves and a dynamo for light? Or with racing handle-bars?"

"No."

"In that circumstantial eventuality there can be no question of a motor-bicycle," he said. He looked surprised and puzzled and leaned sideways on the counter on the prop of his left elbow, putting the knuckles of his right hand between his yellow teeth and raising three enormous wrinkles of perplexity on his forehead. I decided now that he was a simple man and that I would have no difficulty in dealing with him exactly as I desired and finding out from him what had happened to the black box. I did not understand clearly the reason for his questions about bicycles but I made up my mind to answer everything carefully, to bide my time and to be cunning in all my dealings with him. He moved away abstractedly, came back and handed me a bundle of differently-coloured papers which looked like application forms for bull-licences and dog-licences and the like.

"It would be no harm if you filled up these forms," he said. "Tell me," he continued, "would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?"

"It would not," I replied.

"On a patent tandem?"

"No."

"Dentists are an unpredictable coterie of people," he said. "Do you tell me it was a velocipede or a penny-farthing?"

"I do not," I said evenly. He gave me a long searching look as if to see whether I was serious in what I was saying, again wrinkling up his brow.

"Then maybe you are no dentist at all," he said, "but only a man after a dog licence or papers for a bull?"

"I did not say I was a dentist," I said sharply, "and I did not say anything about a bull."

The Sergeant looked at me incredulously.

"That is a great curiosity," he said, "a very difficult piece of puzzledom, a snorter."

He sat down by the turf fire and began jawing his knuckles and giving me sharp glances from under his bushy brows. If I had horns upon my head or a tail behind me he could not have looked at me with more interest. I was unwilling to give any lead to the direction of the talk and there was complete silence for five minutes. Then his expression eased a bit and he spoke to me again.

"What is your pronoun?" he inquired.

"I have no pronoun," I answered, hoping I knew his meaning.

"What is your cog?"

"My cog?"

"Your surnoun?"

"I have not got that either."

My reply again surprised him and also seemed to please him. He raised his thick eyebrows and changed his face into what could be described as a smile. He came back to the counter, put out his enormous hand, took mine in it and shook it warmly.

"No name or no idea of your originality at all?"

"None."

"Well, by the holy Hokey!"

Signor Bari, the eminent one-legged tenor!

"By the holy Irish-American Powers," he said again, "by the Dad! Well carry me back to old Kentucky!"

He then retreated from the counter to his chair by the fire and sat silently bent in thought as if examining one by one the by-gone years stored up in his memory.

"I was once acquainted with a tall man," he said to me at last, "that had no name either and you are certain to be his son and the heir to his nullity and all his nothings. What way is your pop today and where is he?"

It was not, I thought, entirely unreasonable that the son of a man who had no name should have no name also but it was clear that the Sergeant was confusing me with somebody else. This was no harm and I decided to encourage him. I considered it desirable that he should know nothing about me but it was even better if he knew several things which were quite wrong. It would help me in using him for my own purposes and ultimately in finding the black box.

"He is gone to America," I replied.

"Is that where," said the Sergeant. "Do you tell me that? He was a true family husband. The last time I interviewed him it was about a missing pump and he had a wife and ten sonnies and at that time he had the wife again in a very advanced state of sexuality."

"That was me," I said, smiling.

"That was you," he agreed. "What way are the ten strong sons?"

"All gone to America."

"That is a great conundrum of a country," said the Sergeant, "a very wide territory, a place occupied by black men and strangers. I am told they are very fond of shooting-matches in that quarter."

"It is a queer land," I said.

At this stage there were footsteps at the door and in marched a heavy policeman carrying a small constabulary lamp. He had a dark Jewish face and hooky nose and masses of black curly hair. He was blue-jowled and black-jowled and looked as if he shaved twice a day. He had white enamelled teeth which came, I had no doubt, from Manchester, two rows of them arranged in the interior of his mouth and when he smiled it was a fine sight to see, like delph on a neat country dresser. He was heavy-fleshed and gross in body like the Sergeant but his face looked far more intelligent. It was unexpectedly lean and the eyes in it were penetrating and observant. If his face alone were in question he would look more like a poet than a policeman but the rest of his body looked anything but poetical.

"Policeman MacCruiskeen," said Sergeant Pluck.

Policeman MacCruiskeen put the lamp on the table, shook hands with me and gave me the time of day with great gravity. His voice was high, almost feminine, and he spoke with a delicate careful intonation. Then he put the little lamp on the counter and surveyed the two of us.

"Is it about a bicycle?" he asked.

(pp. 66-69)

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object - to the eyes of a man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye.

So far, one may say, so good. Whether this idea is right or wrong, the amount of time involved is so negligible that few reasonable people would argue the point. But de Selby, ever loath to leave well enough alone, insists on reflecting the first reflection in a further mirror and professing to detect minute changes in this second image. Ultimately he constructed the familiar arrangement of parallel mirrors, each reflecting diminishing images of an interposed object indefinitely. The interposed object in this case was de Selby's own face and this he claims to have studied backwards through an infinity of reflections by means of "a powerful glass". What he states to have seen through this glass is astonishing. He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them - too tiny to be visible to the naked eye - being the face of a beardless boy of twelve, and, to use his own words, "a countenance of singular beauty and nobility". He did not succeed in pursuing the matter back to the cradle "owing to the curvature of the earth and the limitations of the telescope."

So much for de Selby. I found MacCruiskeen with a red face at the kitchen table panting quietly from all the food he had hidden in his belly. In exchange for the cigarette he gave me searching looks. "Well, now," he said.

He lit the cigarette and sucked at it and smiled covertly at me.

"Well, now," he said again. He had his little lamp beside him on the table and he played his fingers on it.

"That is a fine day," I said. "What are you doing with a lamp in the white morning?"

"I can give you a question as good as that," he responded. "Can you notify me of the meaning of a bulbul?"

"A bulbul?"

"What would you say a bulbul is?"

This conundrum did not interest me but I pretended to rack my brains and screwed my face in perplexity until I felt it half the size it should be.

"Not one of those ladies who take money?" I said.

"No."

"Not the brass knobs on a German steam organ?"

"Not the knobs."

"Nothing to do with the independence of America or suchlike?"

"No."

"A mechanical engine for winding clocks?"

"No."

"A tumour, or the lather in a cow's mouth, or those elastic articles that ladies wear?"

"Not them by a long chalk."

"Not an eastern musical instrument played by Arabs?"

He clapped his hands.

"Not that but very near it," he smiled, "something next door to it. You are a cordial intelligible man. A bulbul is a Persian nightingale. What do you think of that now?"

"It is seldom I am far out," I said dryly.

He looked at me in admiration and the two of us sat in silence for a while as if each was very pleased with himself and with the other and had good reason to be.

"You are a B.A. with little doubt?" he questioned.

I gave no direct answer but tried to look big and learned and far from simple in my little chair.

"I think you are a sempiternal man," he said slowly.

He sat for a while giving the floor a strict examination and then put his dark jaw over to me and began questioning me about my arrival in the parish.

"I do not want to be insidious," he said, "but would you inform me about your arrival in the parish? Surely you had a three-speed gear for the hills?"

"I had no three-speed gear," I responded rather sharply, "and no two-speed gear and it is also true that I had no bicycle and little or no pump and if I had a lamp itself it would not be necessary if I had no bicycle and there would be no bracket to hang it on."

"That may be," said MacCruiskeen, "but likely you were laughed at on the tricycle?"

"I had neither bicycle nor tricycle and I am not a dentist," I said with severe categorical thoroughness, "and I do not believe in the penny-farthing or the scooter, the velocipede or the tandem-tourer."

MacCruiskeen got white and shaky and gripped my arm and looked at me intensely.

"In my natural puff," he said at last, in a strained voice, "I have never encountered a more fantastic epilogue or a queerer story. Surely you are a queer far-fetched man. To my dying night I will not forget this today morning. Do not tell me that you are taking a hand at me?"

"No," I said.

"Well Great Crikes!"

He got up and brushed his hair with a flat hand back along his skull and looked out of the window for a long interval, his eyes popping and dancing and his face like an empty bag with no blood in it.

Then he walked around to put back the circulation and took a little spear from a place he had on the shelf.