Born in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911, Flann O’Brien was one of a pair of commonly used pen names belonging to Brian O’Nolan. Under the other, Myles na gCopaleen, he wrote satirical columns in The Irish Times, sometimes in the Irish language, and sometimes in English, covering topics ranging from landladies to World War II to alcoholic ice cream. The New York Times once wrote that “Myles was feared as were some of the ancient Gaelic poets, who it was said could kill with a satire.”
It was as Flann O’Brien, however—the name under which he wrote his English-language novels—that he became regarded as a leading figure in 20th century Irish literature, producing several key texts in the annals of modernism and postmodernism, among which The Third Policeman might be one of his most famous, even though he failed to find a publisher for it in his lifetime.
His work has been praised by (and compared to) the likes of James Joyce, Graham Greene, and Jorge Luis Borges, and can frequently be found on lists of the best books of the 20th century. Anthony Burgess once said, “If we don’t cherish the work of Flann O’Brien we are stupid fools who don’t deserve to have great men.”
For those who do cherish the work of Flann O’Brien, or who have never had the pleasure of encountering his unmistakable talents before, these half-dozen books (including his novels and some of his essays as Myles na gCopaleen) are perfect places to introduce (or re-introduce) yourself to his singular voice. And once you get started, odds are you won’t want to stop.
The Third Policeman
Unpublished in O’Brien’s lifetime, The Third Policeman has since become one of his best-known and most celebrated works. Though critical opinions regarding its themes and position in O’Brien’s oeuvre vary, it has been called by some one of O’Brien’s most subversive and postmodern books.
It follows the story of an unnamed narrator with a wooden leg who becomes embroiled in a murderous plot and finds himself crossing paths with a number of overweight policemen who are obsessed with bicycles. All unlikely eventualities that are perfect fodder for O’Brien’s unique storytelling. Characters from The Third Policeman also recur in The Dalkey Archive—which lifts whole sections of this novel, since O’Brien had, at the time, ceased trying to publish it—while the obscure intellectual De Selby who plays a role in both novels was also later borrowed by satirist Robert Anton Wilson for his own work, The Widow’s Son.
At Swim-Two-Birds
Hailed by Graham Greene as “one of the best books of our century” and by James Joyce as “a really funny book,” At Swim-Two-Birds marked Flann O’Brien’s triumphant entry into the annals of Irish literature, and has been a beloved “marvel of imagination, language, and humor” (New Republic) ever since.
Making use heavily of characters borrowed from other works of fiction and legend, At Swim-Two-Birds has been named one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 by Time magazine, as well as one of the 100 best English-language novels of all time by The Guardian, and it’s a perfect introduction to the wild worlds and even wilder characters that O’Brien was capable of envisioning.
The Poor Mouth
“Humor of this quality, this intensity, is very rare,” raves Newsweek of this “hilarious parody of rural Irishness” that has been hailed as “the funniest book by Flann O’Brien” by The Millions. From birth, it seems that Bonaparte O’Coonassa has been reminded of the poverty and hardships that are the lot of he and his people.
In other hands than O’Brien’s, such reminders might prove little more than depressing, but not so in this “wildly funny” (Boston Globe) book that is “hilarious, moving, gorgeously written” (Harper’s Magazine).
The Hard Life
“A comic Irish novel that derives its effect from an absolutely deadpan approach” (The Atlantic), The Hard Life is the story of Finbarr, who is sent to live with his uncle in Dublin after his mother dies. There, he listens to his uncle’s whiskey-fueled conversations with a Jesuit priest, helps his brother in enacting money-making cons to prey on the gullible, and follows as his uncle embarks on a pilgrimage to Rome, to be told to go to hell by the Holy Father himself.
The journey may be wild enough but, as with all of O’Brien’s novels, it’s the getting there where most of the fun lies in this “wild, hilarious, fast moving, irreverent and comic” (New York Herald Tribune) book about growing up poor.
The Dalkey Archive
When Flann O’Brien was unable to get The Third Policeman published in his lifetime, he reused some elements for his last novel, The Dalkey Archive, which is a perfect reminder of why James Joyce praised O’Brien as a writer imbued with “the true comic spirit.” In fact, Joyce himself appears as a character in the book, alongside figures familiar from The Third Policeman, and others who could only have sprung from O’Brien’s fertile imagination.
Mick Shaughnessy is a humble civil servant in the small town of Dalkey, south of Dublin, who discovers that he may be the only person capable of putting a stop to the end of the world in this “witty, sly, outrageous” novel (Texture) that is “not to be missed” (Library Journal).
The Best of Myles
Besides his work as a novelist, O’Brien spent more than twenty years writing columns for the Irish Times under the pen name Myles na gCopaleen. For the first time, some of these one-of-a-kind columns have been collected together into a single volume that attempts to contain some of his “humorous, satirical, learned, grave-faced, crazy writing” (New York Times) and capture the spirit that made him such an important figure in Irish letters.
“Read one by one, his fragments were very funny,” raves The Times Literary Supplement, “but here is a particular pleasure in the continuity of feeling and idiom provided by a book.”
