The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman is a novel by the Irish writer Flann O'Brien (1911–1966). Written between 1939 and 1940, it was rejected by publishers and set aside; it was not published until 1967, a year after the author's death, when it first appeared in the United States. It has since been recognized as an important precursor of postmodernist literature. The Chinese edition, translated by Liu Zhigang, was published by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House in December 2017 as part of the "Dayu Library" series, with the subtitle "50th Anniversary Edition." It is the first Chinese translation. The novel is narrated in the first person: at sixteen, the narrator "I" happens upon the writings of the eccentric scientist de Selby and becomes obsessed with his theories. As an adult he writes a massive treatise on de Selby but has no money to publish it. Urged on by his friend John Divney, the two conspire to murder a wealthy old man, but Divney hides the money for himself. Three years later "I" finally learns where the money is hidden and sets out to retrieve it, but the journey gradually departs from reality—the victim's "ghost" reappears, "I" begins to converse inwardly with his own soul, there is a bizarre police station with no width and no thickness, a sergeant devoted to "atomic theory" delivers endless monologues about "bicycle men," and, in a tiny police barracks adjoining the station, a third policeman works who is the exact double of the murdered old man. The book blends Kafkaesque nightmare with an Alice-style wonderland; taking a murder as its thread, it wraps irrationality in rigorous logic and discusses time, space, death, and existence. The twist at the end reinterprets the entire story, and the novel is also seen as a parody of the descent-into-Hell motif in Dante's Divine Comedy.