Customer Reviews

The Complete Novels (Everyman's Library)

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On the dust jacket for The Complete Novels of Flann O'Brien, the author is lumped in with Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, perhaps the two most famous figures in Irish literature. It's lofty company to be sure, but for most Beckett and especially Joyce are tough mountains to climb. I will readily admit that a lot of what is going with the works of Beckett and Joyce go over my head. I needed a guide to really get Ulysses, and Beckett's works are almost as tough. O'Brien's work is much more palpable though. I enjoy some of the works inspired by Joyce much more than Joyce, and O'Brien falls in to that category.

If you're thinking of purchasing this, your probably already familiar with the contents to some degree, so I won't go in to to much detail concerning the characteristics of each novel. The first two novels in the collection, At Swims Two Birds and the Third Policeman are the strongest of the bunch. Both can be seen as a kind of proto-postmodernism and both are among the best examples of meta-fiction I have read. They are also both really funny and bizarre, and the second one is very dark and chilling as well. The other three novels are all good, but they are generally more pessimistic and less fun to read.

The Everyman's Library edition is fairly affordable and a nice purchase if you're a fan of his work. If you're a fan of Irish Literature then this is also a must read. O'Brien is a very good and very funny writer. He deserves the lofty company the blurb on the dust jacket ascribed to him.

All novels by Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien and a variety of other pennames) included in one volume. That's enough to make this a valuable book. Flann O'Brien is one of Ireland's foremost writers, ranking easily with the likes of Joyce and Beckett: his two recognized masterpieces, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, still unmatched as far as wittiness and comic spirit are concerned, are two of the best modernist novels in English literature; the other novels included here (The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Dalkey Archive) are not as funny or groundbreaking, but definitely worth reading. Too bad The Poor Mouth (probably) loses some in translation (the original was in Gaelic).

The good thing about this edition is certainly it's bargain price (costs less than buying just two of the novels in separate volumes) and Keith Donohue's introduction. Overall, a great buy and definitely a good read!

My favorite reading experiences often occur when a friend with a good (if twisted or dry) sense of humor introduces me to an author I've never heard of. The same friend who introduced me to the comic genius of Peter DeVries recently emailed me his opinion of The Third Policeman. I quickly devoured that book laughing the whole way through, and then I borrowed At Swim Two Birds from my local library. Circumstances prevented me from starting it until right before it was due, and (DRAT!) someone had placed a hold on it. So I ordered this collection.

Two days later, I was happily savoring every page of what may be the most complete comic novel I've ever read. It helps that I seem to have been born with the same desire to poke at anything and everything including structure itself that O'Brien (or O'Nolan) was. What he does is pure genius and can be compared to someone building a house of cards defying previously defined laws of physics and structure in hopes of imploding the whole thing. When it doesn't, he finishes the novel with the ultimate and abrupt comic anti-climax.

I have since moved on to reading A Pour Mouth, originally written in Irish. Even though, I'm certain much of the humor is directed at those who've read (and been bored by) the other Irish literature parodied by this work, I have found this one to be funny as well.

I have been so moved to tears (of laughter and otherwise) by these novels, that I have played them forward to another friend by ordering him a copy as well.

If you like A Confederacy of Dunces, Monty Python, and the like, you will find elements of At Swim Two Birds which have been copied and have influenced these works.

Reading Flann O'Brien for the first time is a bit like eating gourmet jelly beans blindfolded - you delight and sizzle with the unexpected, but end up with a root beer sometimes (OK, maybe you like root beer). His physical description can be very funny and is terse and fresh. He brings everything to the ridiculous and I suppose is some kind of demented genius. Certainly At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman are enjoyable and compelling reads that are hard to put down. The crackling brilliance of the work reminded me somehow of The Pickwick Papers. These stories put O'Brien in the pantheon of modern classic writers.
For all the literary references to other Irish works and culture (At Swim-Two-Birds), my critisicm would be that I can almost hear the recent college-student writer in him. I found myself getting to the end of The Third Policeman wondering what the point was (after some beatiful writing in other chapters).
I recommend the book; a great fun read but probably Flann O'Brien will go back on your shelf as a curiousity and not as someone who framed a lasting view of the way the world is.

O'Brien is wonderful. Very funny--the more one knows about Ireland and the Irish the more hilarious his work becomes but it is hardly necessary to have even heard of Ireland to enjoy his writing. "At Swim-To-Birds" may be the first post-modern novel (unless one counts "Tristam Shandy").

I was reminded of "Molloy" by Samuel Beckett while reading "At Swim" although probably because I expected or even wanted O'Brien to be linked to one of the certified recent geniuses of Irish letters--O'Brien doesn't need any validation other than his work, though.

In "The Poor Mouth", which is a commentary on and vicious satire of the movement that romanticized the Gaels of western Ireland--people who were desperately poor and who would stay that way because they remained an agrarian, non-English speaking remnant of a golden age of Gaelic language and culture that may never have existed. The Gaels live with swine in their huts, it rains constantly and potatoes are boiled and served at seemingly every meal. (One of the insults that I recall my parents and their parents using toward "those other people" was "pig in the parlor Irish" which finally made sense while reading "The Poor Mouth").

The narrator and his family live in a "small, unhealthy, lime-white house, situated at the corner of the glen" because all true Gaels live in such a house. "If there were a hundred corners in all that glen, there was a small, lime-white cabin nestling in each one".

At seven years old he goes off to school where the master asks "Phwat is yer nam?". When he realizes that "Your name he wants", our protagonist begins "Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen..." and on for a few lines. But before he has even "half-uttered" his name, he is smashed on the head by the master who is wielding a large oar. As he loses consciousness he can hear the master scream: "Yer nam is Jams O'Donnell!". It turns out that all the young Gaelic men are called Jams O'Donnell by English speakers..

O'Brien scorns those who celebrate the backward Gaels including a man from Dublin who arrives with a gramophone to record the speech of the locals. He has no success until he accidentally winds up recording the "speech" of a pig dressed as a man--an absurd situation that makes perfect sense within the context of the novel. This gentleman then takes his recording to Berlin, where he is given a "fine academic degree".

A brilliant writer who has never gotten the recognition he deserves. Alternately wild and crazy or deep and philosophical (but not ponderously so).The mischief of Nabakov combined with Nabakov's skill with the language. "The Third Policeman", readable in an evening is a wild, hilarious, unforgettable romp with a stunning conclusion. All the novels are here. This work rewards reading and rereading. Very highly recommended for a permanent collection.

In a recent international conference some important forces at work in O'Brien's novels were both neutralized into clichés by too much remembering and re-energized by the natural crisis of clichés in a moving world.

O'Brien became, after WW2, or even during it, the skeptical voice of post-modernism. It is true the support of many in 1940 in Ireland for the German Blitz on London was short and badly lived by some. Naturally enough O'Brien used the most Irish trait of Irish literature to build a position for himself in Ireland, viz. black humor so typical since Daniel Defoe, and the cultivation of extreme irrationality that goes back to Bran, Mael Duin and King Sweeney at the time of the crossover from pagan beliefs to Christian faith, vengeance to forgiveness.

O'Brien became an institutionalized voice: the voice of derision, dark humor, skeptical disbelieving beliefs. He never left Ireland and his approach to the world and history is something like: I believe you must disbelieve all beliefs to be able to believe in rational and faithful disbeliefs. You could add some more whorls to that doggy yarn running after its tail. That produces "The Poor Mouth", written in Irish and then translated into English, a novel on the fate of the deepest and most authentic Gaels. It does not contain one single act pf religious belief, cult, rite or whatever. If there is a god it is not religious but a vast and vague belief in its existence as the fuel of the fate that brings absolute alienation to the Gaels, absolute bliss in deprivation, absolute depravation of any vital thing, ecstatic beauty in the inevitable apocalypse that will put an end to this world of want, lack and loss with the supreme form of the same want, lack and loss.

O'Brien worked on stories that have several levels of creativity, one contained in the other, and he tried to make us forget he was the master of it all. He is the first creating author. But "At Swim-Two-Birds" he is telling the story of characters rebelling against their author, of the death sentence they will agree upon against him, pronged and prompted by the thorns of the invading ghost of King Sweeney, supposed to be mad. And we forget that these characters are the characters of two authors. That these two authors are created by a creative writing student who is himself the creation of the first creating author, Flann O'Brien himself. If we forget that the intrusions of King Sweeney are absurd though they are the intrusion of a story that is at the very crossroads that leads from pagan territorial attachment to Christian salvation in punishment and forgiveness.

If we forget that the first creating author is the only real one then what he tells us is forgotten. He tells us that life is nothing but a farce where you are nothing but puppets in the hands of a puppeteer. But the rebellion of the puppets can kill the puppeteer though this one is in the hands of a higher puppeteer who is in fact the one who pulls the strings, and yet that very string puller is himself manipulated by an institution that orders him to create a tale, and even a lot more by the real author who sets this student in this context with that objective. And that is not one iota funny because it is a direct vision of our present mediatic virtual society. Do we have any other existence than to be a persona in a virtual tale that is discarded by some unknown higher entity to the back of that entity's mind, or more certainly to the closest garbage dump and disposal to end as minced "non-entity" in a world where we could be the fodder of eternity.

But O'Brien goes so much further in his "Third Policeman". All life is nothing but the imagining - by an author - of the adventures of a man after his accidental but well deserved death. In that vision nothing is true, nothing exists and this vision is not even a phantasm, or the erection of a sausage phallic symbol into the fair companion of the mechanical sexless illusion of movement and life that a bicycle may be. We are then totally empty of everything, even the famous unconscious Id or Es of any de Selby surrogate you may think of. Life is a big laugh and that is tragic. The only thing we can do is laugh AT it and eventually give up the illusion and move away into the shadow of a sheltering shadow.

"The Hard Life" will surprise you by its deeply Dickensian realism, slightly out of place with O'Brien. At the same time it is the only novel in which he clearly speaks of the Catholic church, though maybe marginally as the educating institution used to prepare the kids in this novel both hardly-scarcely and hardly-brutally to their future real hard life. It is fun in a way to get into a bleak atmosphere of a melodramatic situation turned into a tragicomic adventure.

So this author makes people laugh because it is ludic, if not ludicrous, but in fact we should revisit him as a deep, bleak, dark, black, tragic drama that has no happy ending because it has no end, no objective, no target. Life is nothing but a trap in which we have no say. So let's have a laugh. Isn't that the most superb illusion of all, the illusionary laugh at an illusionary fate in an illusionary non-existing world that is not even mental in any meaning of the word because we have no mind.

Seen and read like that, Flann O'Brien is not comical, has no humor, is perfectly tragic, because life is tragic and to laugh at it is the only outlet, compensation and exudative escape for our deeply sick and both retarded and deranged minds.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU