The Third Policeman

Fiction. The last of O'Brien's novels to be published and now reissued by Dalkey Archive, THE THIRD POLICEMAN is Flann O'Brien's brilliant comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botche d robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where he is intruduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and the view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped."