Bloomsday

104 years ago on this day, a fictional event took place in the book of James Joyce, Ulysses. The central character, hero and icon of that book was called Leopold Bloom. So, some Irish people like to commemorate the 16th of June each year as 'Bloomsday', by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, eating kidneys, and reading extracts from Ulysses.

Ulysses on Steady Diet of Books

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"...and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and then the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auction in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousand of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire ad the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-1921

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from Ulysses: A Short History, by Richard Ellmann

"Ulysses may be seen to conduct its affirmation by discovery of kinship among disparate things, whether these are mind and body, casual and important, contemporary and Homeric, or Bloom and Stephen. The universe is, if nothing else, irrevocably interpenetrating, Joyce takes an almost mystical pleasure in convergence – of times, persons, qualities. These receive authorization in Ulysses from no abstract statement, but from language, which is part of the argument as well as means of expressing it. By displaying the utmost linguistic variety, in levels of speech, in styles of writing, Ulysses testifies that, beneath all forms of conscious striving, of individual life or social organization, human beings are at work with syllables to submit language as living and delighting proof of their gregariousness."

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is - at least currently - likely the most recognized of the Irish humorist's novels. It holds a more glamorous reputation than that of the previously reviewed Dalkey Archive and is less achingly literary and somewhat more sensible than his acclaimed debut, At Swim-Two-Birds. What part of that reputation comes from its association with the TV show Lost, as I said before, is probably that "both works are probably equally as difficult to follow".

The Third Policeman is a dark fantasy, a comic tale that delves into murder, death and metaphysics, but never outright farce. The book is set in the provincial Irish countryside, as opposed to the urban and suburban (respectively) Dublin settings of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Dalkey Archive. Hence the focus of the story is on the isolated, cocooned inhabitants of a very strange police station, to which the narrator and main protagonist turns to for assistance at the novel's start.

These policeman (of which there are three) harbour some strange habits, obsessions and, as is ultimately revealed, arcane knowledge. The first, the Sergeant Pluck, is essentially the base for Sergeant Fottrell of The Dalkey Archive, with his obsession with bicycles and their atomic dangers. The second, young Policeman MacCruiskeen, has as a hobby the production of an infinitely regressing series of wooden chests, each fitting inside the one before. The third, Policeman Fox, is the most mysterious, leading a nocturnal and otherwise invisible existence, and not appearing until the very end of the novel. Other characters include John Divney, the narrator's partner- and rival-in-crime of the opening chapters, Mathers, the dead or not-quite-dead miser, Joe, the narrator's soul; a group of one-legged men, said to be allegorical to the IRA; and, in another overlap with The Dalkey Archive, the mad scientist De Selby - who appears in a series of lengthy footnotes which themselves make up a kind of book-within-a-book.

The Dalkey Archive begins autobiographically, in the second paragraph - the first actually begins "Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a spade" - briefly charting the way in which the situation that the narrator finds himself in emerged: the death of his parents; his living in a strange kind of bondage with Divney, the caretaker of the family farm and, later, public house; and their plan to steal the old miser, Mather's, money. Following the apparent murder of Mathers, and some lengthy periods of distrust, the narrator is sent to the old miser's house to retrieve the stashed metal box containing the object of the theft. However, in the tradition of fantastical stories everywhere, as well as in classic science fiction tales of weirdness, 'something happened':

"I cannot hope to describe what it was but it had frightened me very much long before I had understood it even slightly. It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation. The fingers of my right hand, thrust into the opening in the floor, had closed mechanically, found nothing at all and came up again empty. The box was gone!"

From that point on, The Third Policeman descends into surreality and bizarre discoveries. The Harper Perennial blurb describes the novel as "distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy", delivered, it must be said, in the author's inimitable but quintessentially (and therefore, imitating) Irish style. Part of the book's appeal lies - and this is not exactly an original observation, but a memory of something I read elsewhere as well - in its combination of the parochial (the rural setting and the microscopic dramas of the police house) and the universal (the metaphysical and existential discoveries, trappings and just plain absurdities of the plot). While The Dalkey Archive was played as a detective farce, investigating the peculiar yet personal experiments of the inscrutable De Selby, The Third Policeman contains a much more entirely warped and twisted world:

"As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house about which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked like it would not deceive a child. That was not in itself sufficient to surprise me because I had seen pictures and notices by the roadside before. What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply-rooted in my mind, that there were people inside it. I had no doubt at all that it was the barracks of the policeman. I had never seen anything with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder…

I kept on walking, but walked more slowly. As I approached, the house seemed to change its appearance. At first, it did nothing to reconcile itself with the shape of an ordinary house but it became uncertain in outline like a thing glimpsed under ruffled water. Then it became clear again and I saw that it began to have some back to it, some small space for rooms behind the frontage. I gathered this from the fact that I seemed to see the front and the back of the ‘building’ simultaneously from my position approaching what should have been the side. As there was no side that I could see I thought the house must be triangular with its apex pointing towards me but when I was only fifteen yards away I saw a small window apparently facing me and I knew from that that there must be some side to it. then I found myself almost in the shadow of the structure, dry-throated and timorous from wonder and anxiety. It seemed ordinary enough at close quarters except that it was very white and still. It was momentous and frightening: the whole morning and the whole world seemed to have no purpose at all save to frame it and give it some magnitude and position so that I could find it with my simple senses and pretend to myself that I understood it. A constabulary crest above the door told me it was a police station. I had never seen a police station like it."

In this bizarre universe, the narrator's journey takes on an air of inexplicability and unknowableness that marks it out as less of a comic fantasy than a science fiction novel. The wit is ever-present of course, but nonetheless often heavily overlaid with a profoundly odd sense of fear and trepidation. The Third Policeman is thus a novel of combination, "a murder thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle and a chilling fable about unending guilt".

Like Lost, the piece of modern culture that this novel is so tantalisingly connected to, The Third Policeman is a cryptic tale, but it is not one entirely without resolution or exposition. From the first extract above, and from some adjectives I could easily have used in describing the book, a good deal of the plot's secret may be guessed. Regardless of the actual nature of the plot or the narrator's journey, however, The Third Policeman remains a work of surreal comedy and bizarre wit. A useful appendix to my edition details some of the book's history, and proves that some of the book's truth is stranger than its fiction:

'A Curious Tale'

A publisher’s note at the end of The Third Policeman displays a letter, written in 1940 by O’Brien to the American author William Saroyan, in which he explains some of its eccentricities.

By the time they reach this letter, readers will already have marvelled at the book’s many themes: man’s search for God, for eternal youth, for unimaginable power and treasures, and his relationship with nature, with the soul, with the myriad mysteries of the universe and, crucially, with the bicycle.

A beguiling and curious combination of many books and styles – part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, part Gulliver’s Travels, part Seventh Voyage of Sinbad - The Third Policeman drifts from bizarre fantasy to sheer nonsense and back again, propelled by frequent drafts of dry wit. It is, in the immortal words of one of the policeman, ‘nearly an insoluble pancake’.

Almost as strange as the novel’s plot is its history. It was written after the publication of O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, but was rejected by his publishers who wrote: ‘We realize the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this novel he is more so.’ He had been thinking about adapting it for the stage, probably influenced by Saroyan’s success as a playwright, but abandoned the idea after this blow.

Nevertheless, he did try his luck abroad, sending the manuscript to literary agents in America through a contact of Saroyan’s, with the perhaps more apposite title of Hell Goes Round and Round. However, further enquiries revealed that they had mislaid it. Perhaps enraged, or inspired, by this carelessness, he abandoned all attempts to place it with anyone and began telling friends that he had mislaid the manuscript, even inventing different fates for it. These ranged from the simple mistake of leaving it on a tramcar or showing it to someone at the Dolphin Hotel and then leaving without it, to the inspired notion that he had taken it on a trip to Donegal by car only for the pages to have somehow been blown out of the boot. To an actor friend who knew a film director and who felt it might be adapted into a script he offered the rather undramatic yarn of having left it on a train. Only his friend Donal McDonagh knew the truth and, after O’Brien had asked him to look at the novel again to see what was wrong with it, McDonagh replied ‘nothing’. Despite this assurance, it lay unread for twenty-six years.

Yet various chunks of The Third Policeman did appear in O’Brien’s final novel, The Dalkey Archive. Largely concerned with bicycles and policeman, some of the material has been lifted, word for word, from the original source. And a short story published under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, called ‘Two in One’, also borrowed from the unpublished novel. But when O’Brien’s friend and biographer Anthony Cronin suggested that the story should be published under the byline Flann O’Brien, the latter replied ominously, ‘I don’t know that fellow any more.’

James Joyce, Ulysses (II)

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

- Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat, and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak…”

(Ch. 1 - Telemachus)

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I

And so begins one of the most unfairly denigrated books of the twentieth century. Denigrated unfairly, in fact, for both obscenity and inaccessibility. Scholars of the future may well term this the ‘Joycean paradox’ – how a book was banned for its explicitness in the first half of the twentieth century, and how in the second half it was derided as meaningless nonsense. Hopefully, in the twenty-first century we should be able to come up with some kind of cohesive response.

To be kind to the unreconstructed bigots and the revisionists, who may or may not be all the same people, there is plenty that is difficult about this book. And furthermore, I’m not the kind of person to advocate any kind of Great Books - books that are not only must-reads, but must-likes. I just enjoy reading great books, and admit that it may be entirely possible to dislike Ulysses while retaining a full intellectual faculty.

So, to any remaining philistines who are reading this, I shall now endeavour to show you why Ulysses is a book well worth reading. (Rest assured, as well, that I often write with my tongue so far in my cheek that it pokes out the other side)

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II

Ulysses is not really just a book, it’s a whole cultural experience. It is, after all, an epic description of a day in the life of Ireland’s capital city in the early years of the twentieth centuries, and with all the political, social and cultural baggage that comes with, transformed into an immense work of art. It’s not the greatest story ever told, but it is a good attempt at capturing everything about character and situation into the one book.

Even just as a book, it still works very well. I’ve never read Homer, so most of the whole Greek analogies are over my head, but Ulysses does have a certain structure to it. Originally, there were title chapters in the manuscript, corresponding to episodes of the Homeric poem – Sirens, Nausikaa, Telemachus etc – but at least in my Penguin edition, these aren’t included in the body of the text. I think that it is good to at least be aware of the extra level of meaning, but it is not really necessary to the appreciation of Ulysses as a modern novel. Sure, if you’re an English scholar, then maybe you should know…

The chapters do help structure the book, however, because what Joyce is all about here is switching between styles of writing – generally becoming increasingly impenetrable. The extract above reads pretty much as an ordinary novel, although there is hinted at that extra freedom of description, that lyrical touch which makes even comparatively normal Joyce (selections of Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist) so enjoyable to read. In the other extracts I have produced (here and here) the effect is ratcheted up to a much heavier degree. A lot of the writing in Ulysses is pretty detached from meaning and any kind of real communication with the reader.

There. I said it – euphemistically, of course – that Ulysses is a load of nonsense at times, and that no right-thinking individual who isn’t an idiot savant or a crazed poet should really worry about understanding Joyce’s alleged masterpiece.

That’s true – if only for, as Terry Pratchett would say, a given value of ‘truth’ – but I hardly think it should stop you from enjoying the book. Common sense would seem to give you two options with regarding to reading the unreadable: either you keep hold of the idea that there is a meaning in there, to be decoded with sufficient attention and knowledge; or you just ride on over the passage, absorbing the language and the sounds, and the seemingly incidental ideas. Of course, the real answer has to be a synthesis of the two: just keep on going, and see what you pick up – you might be surprised!

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(Yes, that is Marilyn Monroe, and that is apparently Ulysses that she is reading. She said she liked the sounds of the book, but more importantly she read it the way one is meant to - not all at once, but randomly, from chapter to chapter)

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III

As I say, Ulysses is a lot more than just a book. It’s a whole idea about approaching literature, about giving words meaning and power they might not have had already. It is an attempt to apply literature to as many facets of life as possible, to describe the whole sum of human experience, thought and communication and not just the rarified strand which makes up ordinary narrative.

In this sense, Ulysses is all about the legacy. For me, that legacy is chiefly the beat literature of Kerouac. Of course, Kerouac had plenty of other influences, and thankfully so, because otherwise he wouldn’t be half as interesting a writer. I wasn’t even consciously aware of the connection for a while, other than a few abstract references, and despite the fact that I began reading them within a few years of each other.

It was, though, when I broke with a pretty much continuous stretch of reading Kerouac’s novels and even some of his poetry, and picked up Ulysses again, that I realised that, in fact, I had been reading Joyce all along. Filtered through the Beat consciousness, the craziness of American popular culture and the haze of literary and psychochemical experimentation, it was all pretty much the same thing; the wholesale deconstruction and explosion of language. It’s all about, as well, the expression of thought and feeling in that wonderfully direct, expansive and lyrically beautiful fashion, although Kerouac comes across as a much more likeable and personable writer than Joyce.

Ulysses is built up so much as a classic of literature that it’s easy to forget sometimes what it’s meant to be; a document of communication, distorted for effect. It’s a statement, too, which is why it’s big and heavy. It’s a masterpiece, a virtuoso performance, which makes it so grand – but at heart, it’s simple really.

There must be hundreds of other difficult-to-read modernist authors who have come after Joyce, all of them owing a debt to the master and producing their own progressive, exciting pieces which join in the high miasma of modern literature. I haven’t had the chance to read many of them, but I’m sure they exist. Of course, it’s all post-modern now; Joyce is consigned to history, and the ideas have changed – but there will always be great books that attempt to describe life like Ulysses did.

Probably the best living American author, Don De Lillo, did something of the kind with his massive Underworld. It’s a globe-spanning, era-jumping description of New York in the second half of the twentieth century, just as Ulysses was a single-day, perambulatory account of Edwardian Dublin one warm summer’s day – both of them a view of life across classes, personalities, ideologies and histories. De Lillo’s prose is hardly to be called Joycean – in fact it’s qualitatively very different – but he does have some of the same kind of ambition that Joyce did.

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Today, Ulysses perseveres. Better still, it pervades. The cultural experience which is a novel of some 700-odd pages and lot of made-up words, is clung to tightly by a certain few in my native city – not to mention its global, and significantly, American, following.

It pops up in the strangest of situations: once, in the course of an amicable conversation with a police sergeant – in fact, the exact equivalent and real-life successor of Flann O’Brien’s Sergeant Fottrell – the values of marine bathing were discussed, and he quoted with great mirth Joyce’s “snotgreen scrotumtightening sea”.

In Dublin, Bloomsday is a significant annual celebration, with the centennial in 2004 drawing huge crowds of Joyceans, and other cultural tourists. Amongst other events, there was a massive open-air breakfast of lambs’ kidneys, numerous Gorgonzola lunches, as well as public readings from the book – invariably including a reading by Ireland’s first openly homosexual senator – and throngs of enthusiasts dressed in Edwardian clothing.

There may be a streak of fandom in the celebration of Ulysses which makes me uncomfortable. But it’s probably because I don’t want to see the greatest novel ever written being regarded with any more suspicion than it already is. Ulysses is, I suppose, just another book: but it is one which very much pushes at the boundaries of that concept.

Flann O'Brien - On the (Vico) Road

I was fascinated upon first reading The Dalkey Archive, many years ago, as the very first page began with a wonderful lyrical description of a local landmark; I'd already gathered from the title that it might have something to do with the area, but I didn't expect it to jump straight into something so familiar. Of course, the rest of the book is pretty fantastical, but there are constant local and historical references amongst all the intrigue and farce.

For this blog I decided a few months ago, at the end of the summer, to take my camera and retrace the route of the first page and its description of the lovely Vico Road. Not surprisingly, the book travels a lot faster in print than it does on foot, but the essential sequence of things is still valid. Let us take a journey... like the Joyceans who traipse around Sandycove and its Martello tower, Flann O'Brien's character follows a slightly more humble and less erudite path around the sleepy (and prohibitively expensive) environs of Deilginis...

"1.

Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction. And it is – vestibule of a heavenly conspection.

Behold it. Ascend a shaded, dull, lane-like way, per iter, as it were, tenebricosum, and see it burst upon as if a curtain had been miraculously whisked away. Yes, the Vico Road.

The road itself curves gently upward and over a low wall to the left by the footpath enchantment is spread – rocky grassland falling fast away to reach a toy-like railway far below, with beyond it the immeasurable immanent sea, quietly moving slowly in the immense expanse of Killiney Bay. High in the sky which joins it at a seam far from precise, a caravan of light cloud labours silently to the east.

And to the right? Monstrous arrogance: a mighty shoulder of granite climbing ever away, its overcoat of furze and bracken embedded with stern ranks of pine, spruce, fir and horse-chestnut, with further on fine clusters of slim, meticulous eucalyptus – the whole a dazzle of mildly moving leaves, a farrago of light, colour, haze and copious air, a wonder that is quite vert, verdant, vertical, verticillate, vertiginous, in the shade of branches even verspentine. Heavens, has something escaped from the lexicon of Sergeant Fottrell?

But why this name Vico Road? Is there to be recalled in this magnificence a certain philosoper’s pattern of man’s lot on earth – thesis, antithesis, chaos? Hardly. And is that to be compared with the Bay of Naples? That is not to be thought of, for in Naples there must be heat and hardness belabouring dessicated Italians – no soft Irish skies, no little breezes that feel almost coloured.

At a great distance ahead and up, one could see a remote little obelisk surmounting some steps where one can sit and contemplate this scene: the sea, the peninsula of Howth across the bay and distantly, to the right, the dim outline of the Wicklow mountains, blue or grey. Was the monument erected to honour the Creator of all this splendour? No. Perhaps in remembrance of a fine Irish person He once made – Johannes Scotus Erigena, perhaps, or possibly Parnell? No, indeed: Queen Victoria..."

James Joyce - Ulysses (I)

"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthnthnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is in the

Gold pinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.

Trilling, trilling. Idoleres.

Peep! Who’s in the … peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowel. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!

Jingle. Bloo.

Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn. Hawhorn.

When first he saw. Alas!

Full tup. Full throb.

Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

Goodgod henev erheard inall.

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlight nightcall: far:far.

I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming.

Listen!"

(Ch. 8 - Sirens)

Brendan Behan - After the Wake

Brendan Behan was a mid-20th century Irish writer, and another great example of drink-sodden Irish literature. Even better, he reminds me of Bukowski, the great drink-sodden exponent of Beat literature. Behan is best known as the author of Borstal Boy, an autobiographical account of his imprisonment at a young age in a English jail, and which was later adapted for the stage. After the Wake is a collection of Behan short stories, as well as journalistic pieces, and includes part of the Borstal Boy story.

Recently, the Dublin port company have been running a series of posters promoting the use of the port as a tourist link to Britain, somewhat bizarrely through reference to the numerous literary emigrés who took the 'mailboat' out of the country, often never to return. James Joyce is one, and Behan - a well-known nationalist author - another. I say bizarrely, because the prime motivation for this emigration (hardly the jaunty travelling that the company wishs to advertise) was, I would think, the conservative and narrow-minded culture, not to mention economic and political stagnation, of Ireland itself. I mean, these supposed national literary heroes were one-way ticket people, and more exiles than emigrés. And the self-proclaimed 'Borstal Boy' is an unlikely candidate for a reputable, not to say distinguished, cultural ambassador.

I had not in fact personally read Behan until very recently, when I picked this book up at the local library, and to say the least I was impressed. Think perhaps of the realism and dark humour of Bukowksi, against or rather with a more generous, gentler and less sociopathically destructive nature, and set within an older, impoverished yet verbally acute culture. Even just on literary merit alone, and leaving aside the politics, humanity and vibrancy of his characters, these short stories represent some very skilled writing.

This extract is from a story called 'The Execution', an understated, lightly scored (in the sense of the author playing on the emotions) and surprisingly tender tale of paramilitary murder and warped social relations. Pints, pistols and gombeens are not a world away from Bukowski's seedy underbelly of California. Well, in fact they are... but only becuase it's a small world. Read on; some knowledge of Irish history useful!

"We went in, Ellis between Kit and myself. The poor devil wouldn’t have run if we’d let him. He was telling me how it wasn’t his fault giving the dump away. He had never been picked up before and the cells had got in on him. Smiling contentedly to himself he was, and saying that maybe the boys wouldn’t think too badly of him when he took his tar and feathering like a man. Real wistfully he said to me, ‘I’d sooner get an awful beating than a tar and feathering because that’d be a terrible disgrace, my old man being a ’16 man an’ all.’ God help him. My father was a Dublin Fusilier in 1916, but that’s the way.

I squeezed his arm in a friendly way. I’d never liked him much before but I felt sorry for him and sorrier for his people. He had been fond of boasting about the Fenian tradition of his family. Still, we couldn’t let people give away dumps on us or there’d soon be no respect for the Army.

We entered the snug.

I’d my hand through the pocket of my mac and on my skit. It was a Police Positive .38 in a slip-holster, a nice small skit.

Gerry Dolan, I knew, had either a Lüger, Parabellum, Walther or a Browning. They were the only automatics in the company dump, except for a few Colt autos and a 9mm Peter that was too big to lug around. And Gerry dearly loved automatics, especially ones with queer names. I never saw the day he’d be satisfied with a Smith or Webley.

You can sometimes judge a fellow by his taste in skits.

Now Kit, I could swear, would be carrying a Colt auto. He liked a Smith but held that it was bulky for work like this. Although he didn’t love automatics as a rule, gra for the Colt. Mainly, I think, because when he went around checking dumps with the Batt. Q/M he could pinch a few rounds of Thompson stuff to bang off in it. A wild lad Kit, but dependable. A bit of a boozer. He used drink with Mickey Horgan and Connie.

For all that I’d nearly had them dismissed for using Army stuff on an unofficial job, I thought the three of them the best suited of the five of us in tonight’s work. Connie and Mickey would be carrying short Webleys.

I ordered four drinks – four pints, a mineral for Dolan and a glass of whiskey for Ellis. They give a condemned man a glass of rum and a cigarette in France. I wished Ellis had asked for a bottle of stout. Connie, Kit and Mickey were drinking abstractedly. The frothy rings on their glasses were equi-distant.

I wasn’t used to drink and was sorry I’d hadn’t ordered an ale, a pint seemed even more unmanageable tonight.

Ellis knocked back his whiskey and asked what we were having. I didn’t want to stop there all night and said we’d better be going. I was surprised when Gerry Dolan said it was his round. He ordered three pints, ale for me, and two whiskeys. His face reddened when I looked at him.

When we got in the car again Ellis’s spirits seemed even further improved, the liquor I supposed. He offered me a cigarette and struck a match; his face was very young looking.

About three miles further was the spot. It would be my job to tell them to get out of the car. Ellis would see the loneliness of it. There wasn’t a house in sight of it. It didn’t seem so easy a thing now.

It was a frosty night and my legs were getting a bit cramped. I hoped Ellis wouldn’t start crying or anything. I’d sooner he put a fight. It would be easier to let him have it.

‘Let him have it,’ ‘plugging him,’ ‘knocking him off’. It’s small wonder people are shy of describing the deed properly. We were going to kill him..."

Flann O'Brien - The Dalkey Archive

Hopefully I can keep this post a good deal shorter than the Knut Hamsun review – the trouble is, classic novels seem to have a symbiotic relationship with long, semi-academic introductions. However, Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive isn’t a classic book, although you could say it’s written by a classic author. Flann O’Brien is probably my favourite Irish author, being as he was essentially a comedic Joyce. Not that James Joyce didn’t have his moments of levity, but he never exactly threatened to engulf the reader in hilarity, which is often what Flann O’Brien’s novels do.

Flann O’Brien (real name Brian O’Nolan; forced to adopt a literary pseudonym due to his occupation as an Irish civil servant, he also wrote voluminously in newspapers under the even more ridiculous alias of Myles na Gopaleen) wrote in the middle of the last century, The Dalkey Archive being published in 1964 shortly before his death two years later. O’Brien was a gifted, creative and very funny novelist, albeit also an often drink-sodden one (see my previous contribution to literary theory here). Part travelling in the shadow of Joyce, part mired in his own bitterness and cynicism, his body of work nevertheless still stands out as some of the freshest and most original parts of Irish literature.

So what is The Dalkey Archive? To my mind, it is the most accessible of Flann O’Brien’s works. The posthumously published The Third Policeman (which recently had its cult status re-ignited by a connection to the plot of Lost; I’m not a follower of that show, but I’d hazard a guess that that both works are probably equally as difficult to follow) while perhaps even funnier in its surreal fantasy, lacks the ordinary charm of The Dalkey Archive. And in comparison with his heavily Joyce-influenced 1939 debut, At Swim Two-Birds, The Dalkey Archive is eminently more readable.

In a way, The Dalkey Archive is a detective novel, or at least a pastiche thereof. At the same time, it is a gloriously daft, surreal comic fantasy, not to mention an ingenious satire on Irish drama. Perhaps also it is a portrait of the old-fashioned world then to be found in Dalkey, a suburban village on the outskirts of Dublin city. Trams, priests and of course pubs abound. Variety and familiarity characterise this novel – variety, because of the comedy and surreal happenings of the novel, and familiarity because of the quintessentially Irish characters and cultural setting.

It might help to mention here that three main characters in the book are, in order of appearance: De Selby, a mad scientist living in peaceful solitude by the sea in Dalkey; Sergeant Fottrell, the senior policeman in the village with deep metaphysical suspicion regarding bicycles (see below); and Joyce himself, not dead but living an anonymous existence in the rather unexciting tourist resort of Skerries, some way north of Dublin. These excellent comic sketches revolve around the comparatively straightforward protagonist; ‘Mick’, an abstemious, earnest young civil servant and heavily ironic alter ego of the author, whose devious interference in disparate and rather implausible events only adds an extra gloss to the intricate humour of the novel.

In short, The Dalkey Archive is a cheerfully daft yet breathlessly readable novel of madcap happenings in an archaic, though not entirely dated culture. The extract below, I hope, should give an indication of the genius of this book: it seems, even to me, to be difficult in this dialogue to distinguish the typical Hibernian idiom from the daft (and arguably even more typically Hibernian) surrealism. Believe me, Irish people do, or at least once did, actually talk like this… particularly when they had ‘a drop taken’, as they say!

The sergeant beckoned the waitress, ordered a barley wine for himself and a small bottle of ‘that’ for his friend. Then he leaned forward confidentially.

- Did you ever discover or hear tell of mollycules? he asked.

- I did of course.

- Would it surprise or collapse you to know that the Mollycule Theory is at work in the parish of Dalkey?

- Well… yes and no.

- It is doing terrible destruction, he continued, the half of the people is suffering from it, it is worse than the smallpox.

- Could it not be taken in hand by the Dispensary Doctor or the National Teachers, or do you think it is a matter for the head of the family?

- The lock, stock and barrel of it all, he replied almost fiercely, is the County Council.

- It seems like a complicated thing all right.

The sergeant drank delicately, deep in thought.

- Michael Gilhaney, a man I know, he said finally, is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the operation of the Mollycule Theory. Would it astonish you ominously to hear that he is in danger of being a bicycle?

Mick shook his head in polite incomprehension.

- He is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation, the sergeant said, and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the pertimious hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than halfway now.

- Halfway to where?

- Halfway to being a bloody bicycle himself.

Had Sergeant Fottrell for once betrayed himself in drunken rambling? His fancies were usually amusing but not so good when they were meaningless. When Mick said something of the kind the sergeant stared at him impatiently.

- Did you ever study the Mollycule Theory when you were a lad? he asked. Mick said no, not in any detail.

- That is a very serious defalcation and an abstruse exacerbation, he said severely, but I’ll tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small molecules of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable various other routes too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. Do you follow me intelligently? Mollycules?

- I think I do.

- They are as lively as twenty punky leprechauns doing a jig on the top of a flat tombstone. Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around doing intricate convulsions inside the baste. What else is it but that?

- That would be bound to make the sheep dizzy, Mick observed, especially if the whirling was going on inside the head as well.

The sergeant gave him a look which no doubt he would describe as one of non-possum and noli-me-tangere.

- That’s a most foolhardy remark, he said sharply, because the nerve-strings and the sheep’s head itself are whirling into the same bargain and you can cancel out one whirl against the other and there you are – like simplifying a division sum when you have fives above and below the bar.

- To say the truth I did not think of that.

- Mollycules is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra but you would want to take it by degrees with rulers and cosines and familiar other instruments and then at the wind-up not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened you would have to go back to over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures as exactly delineated from Hall and Knight’s Algebra and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole pancake properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hearting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in the middle of your bed.

- Very true, Mick decided to say.

- If you hit a rock hard enough and often enough with an iron hammer, some mollycules of the rock will go into the hammer and contrariwise likewise.

- That is well known, he agreed.

- The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the mollycules of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in country parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.

Mick made a little gasp of astonishment that made a sound like the air coming from a bad puncture.

- Good Lord, I suppose you’re right.

- And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of the humanity.