A few months ago, I wrote about Anthony Cronin’s recently reissued memoir, Dead As Doornails, particularly as that book recounts Cronin’s recollections of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. I said at the time that I’d return to it to take a look at what Cronin has to say about Brian Ó Nualláin, whom he often refers to as “Myles”, and who published his English-language novels under the name Flann O’Brien (which is what I’ll call him in this post).

When I wrote the earlier post, I hadn’t yet read either of the two novels that are the subject-matter of this one. I made my first hapless attempt on At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) as a preteen. I had heard my parents talking about “difficult” books and asked what they meant and whether I might be able to read them. My mother gave me her copy of At Swim-Two-Birds and some general comments on what I could expect from it. I managed only a few pages. The narrator’s claim, in the first paragraph, that a book might have multiple openings and endings seemed nonsensical to me. A greater obstacle, though, was the description of Finn Mac Cool, which struck me as vaguely disgusting in a way I couldn’t explain:

The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain pass. (At Swim-Two-Birds, 7)

I gave up and didn’t return to At Swim-Two-Birds for approximately 56 years. In the meantime, I didn’t read The Third Policeman either, though for a while I heard a great deal about it: it was popular with some of my fellow students in 1970s UCD. Until a few months ago, the only novel by Flann O’Brien that I had read was The Dalkey Archive (1964), which I had chosen simply because my local library had a copy. That was some time in the 1970s. After a gap of more than 50 years, almost the only thing I remember about it is that it seemed to treat James Joyce somewhat satirically. (At the time, I hadn’t yet read anything by Joyce, so presumably the more subtle aspects of the satire were lost on me.)

I think it’s a fair summary of Anthony Cronin’s assessment to say that he thought of At Swim-Two-Birds, the first of the novels, as a modernist masterpiece, followed by several lesser and, in their different ways, disappointing works.

Shortly after leaving [University College Dublin] and entering the civil service, he published a book of amazing virtuosity, At Swim-Two-Birds, which dealt with the novel form in an utterly nihilistic way, while retainng, in dialogue and description, elements of realism far beyond the compass of most novelists. (Dead As Doornails, 137–8)

In an The Irish Times piece dated 12 December 1975, Cronin described At Swim-Two-Birds as “a genuine anti-novel”, remarking that when it was published “the chief masterpieces of modern, avant-garde writing in English were not quite 20 years old”.

Flann O’Brien had placed himself unerringly in the central tradition of that literature and he had done so with a single book.

Not long after I first read Dead As Doornails in the early 1990s I found myself suspecting that Cronin’s opinion of At Swim-Two-Birds and its place in Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre, might be wrong. Viewed as a whole, and including his newspaper columns as Myles na Gopaleen, the tenor of his work is comic: a mixture of satire, parody, pastiche and absurdity. To be sure, the humour is very often bleak and (as I described it recently) “sour”.

So, rather than seeing Flann O’Brien as Cronin does, a once promising modernist anti-novelist who was unfortunately diverted into less serious work which (for the most part) failed to match his talents, it seemed possible to view him as always having been a satirist or parodist whose first novel belonged to a category not starkly different from his later work. On that view, At Swim-Two-Birds could be taken as a parody of the modernist novel just as plausibly as an example of one. Lack of familiarity with the work prevented me from testing this guess. Actually reading these two novels years later did very little to disabuse me of the notion, nor did it do much to confirm it.

During the 30-odd years between my first reading of Dead As Doornails, and its reissue, I didn’t think very much about the fiction of Flann O’Brien. I certainly didn’t pay any attention to scholarship about or criticism of his novels. When I started to think about writing this post, I had a quick look on JSTOR and was struck by the fact that in recent decades At Swim-Two-Birds has tended to be classed as postmodernist rather than modernist. More recently still, there have been some descriptions of it as metafictional.

I tend to think that “postmodernist” is too slippery and amorphous a category to be much use as a critical tool where literature is concerned. In architecture, for example, postmodernism tends to be viewed as a reaction against modernism, as its contradiction. In literature, though, the relation between postmodernism and its predecessor is more ambiguous, as if the postmodernists are unwilling completely to let modernism go. David Cohen is suggesting something like this when he writes:

O’Brien’s novel is an aggressively anti-modernist work that is simultaneously modernist in the sense that it does not, in its reductio ad absurdum of modernism, advocate a return to more traditional forms of fiction, but rather calls into question the enterprise of artistic creation itself. (David Cohen, “An Atomy of the Novel: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds”, Twentieth Century Literature, 39,2 (1993), 208-229, 208)

I don’t wish to dispute the first part of this, that At Swim-Two-Birds is “aggressively anti-modernist”, but it doesn’t seem to me that much weight can be placed on the absence of advocacy for “a return to more traditional forms”. It’s surely not unusual for a satirist to avoid advocacy for a preferred course of action. Usually it’s enough to hold the real or supposed iniquity up to exposure and ridicule, without outlining the remedial measures that might be required.

I approached this topic expecting to question Cronin’s view of At Swim-Two-Birds as a modernist novel, only to find that the terms of the critical discourse have changed in the last 35 years or so and that, if I wanted to argue that it has been misclassified, I’d have a different fight on my hands than the one I’d been expecting. Because, as I’ve said, I find “postmodernism” too elusive to be useful, I’d much rather argue against the category itself than about whether a particular work fits into it, and to do so would take me far beyond the novels of Flann O’Brien. For now I’ll just mention that 1939 would be very early for postmodernism. I hadn’t come across the term earlier than 1988, twelve years after the original publication of Dead As Doornails, so it’s no surprise that Cronin doesn’t mention it.

Although The Third Policeman wasn’t published till 1967, after Brian Ó Nualláin’s death, it was completed shortly after At Swim-Two-Birds and sent to publishers, who turned it down, in 1940. Cronin describes it as “an uneven book” (Dead As Doornails, 141). That’s all he has to say about it in his memoir, though he goes into more detail in the Irish Times article cited above, where he says that the novel “suffers from the usual fault of allegory in that the world of its author’s imagining lacks substance, texture and, even, detail”. There is a “mere anxiety to describe” and the allegory (as Cronin takes it to be) is not self-consistent. While it seems to me that, in concentrating on the allegorical and descriptive, Cronin is missing what is distinct and characteristic about this novel, he is right to describe it as “uneven”.

The Publisher’s Note at the end of the book includes a letter from the author to William Saroyan in which he wrote:

The only good thing about it is the plot … When you get to the end of the book you realize that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing … It’s made clear that this sort of thing goes on forever — and there you are. (The Third Policeman, 207)

The point of the novel is the “twist”: the narrator has, without knowing it, been dead since page 24, and is condemned to repeat the events of the rest of the book interminably, without end, forever. That means that “the queer ghastly things that have been happening” have to fulfil a dual function. They have to appear a suitable punishment for the murderer without at the same time seeming too tiresome to entertain the reader. It’s a tall order, hence the unevenness as perceived by Cronin. At least the reader has to go through it at most a handful of times.

The idea of hell as an endless loop has been used in subsequent works, notably in film. Parallels have been noted between The Third Policeman and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, in which Colin Farrell plays a hitman who has unintentionally killed a child and is appalled to find that he can never (ever) leave the Belgian city. A more interesting example is Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre los ojos (“Open Your Eyes”, 1997) in which Eduardo Noriega plays César, a spoiled, wealthy and very handsome young man who is about to turn 25 when the film begins.

César has been an orphan since he was 10, when his parents were killed in an accident. His father had owned a chain of restaurants and left César extremely well off. The young man is impatient, often bad-tempered and usually at war with the “partners” who run the business he inherited. His best friend, Pelayo, and Nuria, a woman he has recently slept with, both allude to his reputation for sleeping with a different woman every night. Nuria asks him if he’s afraid of ruining that reputation if he is seen with her a second time. In short, César can be seen as a kind of Don Juan character, and we know where Don Juan ends up.

César doesn’t believe in God (as he tells Antonio, the psychiatrist who is interviewing him in the framing narrative) and by implication doesn’t believe in hell either.

Pelayo is clearly smitten by Sofía, a young actor and mime artist, and confides to César that he thinks she might be the girl of his dreams. César promises Pelayo that he would never let rivalry over a woman damage their friendship and shortly afterwards tells Sofía that if they were to sleep together Pelayo wouldn’t know about it. She comments wryly that friendship obviously means a lot to him and he replies that that’s why he wouldn’t tell Pelayo!

César spends the night of his 25th birthday with Sofía, but they don’t have sex. The next morning, Nuria is waiting for him and takes him for a drive in her bright red Alfa Romeo. After asking César if he believes in God, and not waiting for an answer, she crashes the car at high speed, killing herself and putting César in a coma.

César survives and regains consciousness but his extreme good looks are gone: he compares himself to the Phantom of the Opera. He lost flesh and muscle from his face in the crash and his skull was smashed. His team of surgeons are proud of their work in reconstructing his face, but César angrily berates them for their failure to give him back his appearance.

He withdraws and doesn’t see people, eventually approaching Sofía in a park where she is performing her mime act. They arrange to meet at a club the next night. Sofía takes Pelayo along as well. César gets very drunk and passes out in the street, clutching the prosthetic mask that the surgeons have provided him with. After that, strange and unexpected things begin to happen, culminating in César’s being held awaiting trial for killing Sofía, whom he brutally attacked under the delusion that Nuria had replaced her. Antonio attempts to get César to tell him the full story of what happened but César resists (and doesn’t know much more than Antonio does in any case).

Finally, they discover that César killed himself with sleeping pills, having first paid a company named Life Extension to freeze him cryogenically “like Walt Disney”. Life Extension’s main business is freezing people who have just died, to preserve them until such time in the future as reanimation of the dead (and cure of whatever killed them) will inevitably become possible. But they also have an experimental sideline, of which César has availed himself: instead of reviving him to live in some distant future, they can give him a virtual life in the immediate aftermath of his death. He will control this life: it can be whatever he wants it to be. At one point, Duvernois, the man with the soothing voice who represents Life Extension on television, interrupts his virtual life to show him that he can control the behaviour of the “people” around him. Life Extension has offered César a sort of instant paradise, exclusive to the very wealthy.

But César’s virtual paradise has gone wrong; there’s been some kind of error. Since the Life Extension people insist that he’s in complete control, we must infer that he has, not entirely voluntarily, and not consciously, but out of a deserved sense of his own guilt, turned his “life extension” into a continuing punishment. In short, the wealthy atheist has used his large resources to pay LE to build a secular hell for himself.

So where does the “endless loop” come in? At the end of the film, César confronts Duvernois on the roof of the Torre Picasso in Madrid. Duvernois, who has something of the air of the devil tempting Christ on the top of the Temple, tells César that, as his paradise has gone wrong, he has two options, one of which is to kill himself outright, ending his “life extension” for good. César, though suddenly remembering that he suffers from vertigo, accepts his option and jumps from the building. The film ends with the voice of his alarm clock telling him twice to be calm, then to open his eyes.

This (finally) makes sense of the film’s opening sequence where the alarm clock repeatedly tells him to open his eyes. César finds the streets of Madrid uncannily deserted. Traffic lights change but the only vehicle we see, apart from César’s own, is parked. Then that scene fades out and we get the wake-up sequence again. This time it’s much the same, but Nuria is in César’s bed and he tells her irritably not to programme messages into the alarm clock. The streets are busy, as normal. It’s clear that the second sequence is real life, the morning of César’s birthday, or perhaps the day before. The first sequence, though, is part of his virtual life extension. The fact that there is nobody about implies that this is happening after his confrontation with Duvernois, when the imaginary Frenchman gets César to make everyone disappear, saying they’re not needed. The leap from the building didn’t end César’s life extenion after all: it all starts over. If it’s true, as Duvernois says, that 150 years have passed since César killed himself, it must have started over thousands of times already.

Was Duvernois lying or mistaken? Remember that Duvernois, like everybody else that César encounters after he passes out in the street, is wholly controlled by César’s mind. Whatever the Frenchman says, however unwelcome César may find it, is something that César is making him say. So, in a sense, Duvernois is the devil, a secular devil to go with this secular, concocted hell: something else that César’s unconscious has come up with to torment him with, endlessly.

Amenábar’s film is very different in tone, style and almost every way imaginable from Flann O’Brien’s book which, I suggest, shows the versatility of the idea of hell as an eternally repeating loop. It might seem incongruous that I should spend the bulk of a purported discussion of The Third Policeman writing instead about Abre los ojos. My excuse is that the latter is markedly more entertaining. I was a little surprised to read in Wikipedia that Amenábar considers Abre los ojos his worst film, it having been written by inexperienced teenagers. While it has faults, it’s my clear favourite among those of his films that I’ve seen, the other ones being Tesis, The Others, Mar Adentro and part of Agora.

Editions: Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails, The Lilliput Press paperback (with flaps), 2026;
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 2001, reprinted 2018;
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman, Harper Perennial paperback, 2006.