The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien · first published 1967
56% recommend38% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
A comic surrealist novel with dark, tongue-in-cheek humor and strange logic. Short enough to read in one sitting, it suits readers who enjoy offbeat, absurdist fiction.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grappl
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I'll venture "The Third Policeman" for comic surrealism. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27208.The_Third_Policema...
on “Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?” ↗2 that I've given and reread myself a few times would be: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
on “Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?” ↗The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien Ubik, Philip K. Dick 900 Grandmothers, R.A. Lafferty Moderan, David R. Bunch Radiance, Carter Scholz Little, Big, John Crowley Lizard Music, Daniel Pinkwater Camp Concentration,…
on “Ask HN: What's your favorite sci-fi book?” ↗Absolute stand-outs from my teens, twenties and thirties, respectively, are The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Every visual/graphic/product/web designer should read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.
on “Ask HN: What is one book you would recommend everyone to read?” ↗I enjoyed "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien, an author who died in the 60s but who had been completely unknown to me until this year. It's a short and very surreal novel, with an Irish dark tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction: - The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey. - If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino. You(!)…
on “Don't be terrified of Pale Fire” ↗My gateway drug was The Third Policeman, as read aloud by Patrick Magee on the wireless in 1986, a feat all the more remarkable for a man that was, quite appropriately, dead at the time.
on “Has_not_been_viewed_much” ↗A surprise to see Flann O'Brien pop up in the comments. While we're here, I will say that At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman are fantastic books, I highly recommend them.
on “Has_not_been_viewed_much” ↗Hah, that video was ... unexpected to say the least. I love Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brian - particularly the Third Policeman. I should read The Poor Mouth. Wonder if there are Scottish Gaelic bands like The Rubberbandits. I like Clannadonia, but they are 'just' a piper/drummer band.
on “The Ghosts of Gaelic” ↗…sub-story running in small boxes below the main pageset, I can't remember the details now, it was like Flann O'Brien who put an entire seconary plotline in the footnotes of the "dalkey archive" and/or the "third policeman" This was a little continuing story, episodic, in 2-3 paragraphs per page, and then a hiatus, and then a bit more .. There was also a lot of very odd folk wisdom. I remember one about curing warts by…
on “The Whole Earth Catalog, Where Counterculture Met Cyberculture” ↗…man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?" I felt pleased again. He was now questioning me. "What?" "That No is a better word than Yes," he replied. ― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
on “What is the easiest lifehack? The word “No”” ↗There's a copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien on the floor next to my bed. Does that count?
on “Ask HN: What books do you keep on your desk?” ↗…that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.” ― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman
on “A Vicious Cycle: The Dangerous Dehumanisation of Cyclists” ↗Brain power on a ledger? I've heard it all now. The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien: “Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
on “Do kwon sent $80M a month to secret wallets?” ↗The first item, about bicycles ruining marriages (and to a lesser extend some other items), sheds some light onto Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I didn't anticipate people would talk about bicycles ruining families seriously, thought it had been written just as a bizarre thing for a bizarre world, 100% invented, and now, it turns out, it's not…
on “Things people blamed on bicycles” ↗