THIS BOOK IS BY FAR ONE OF THE MOST ‘WACKY’ STORIES THAT I HAVE EVER READ. The plot of this extraordinary shaggy dog story takes numerous bizarre turns. It is only at the end, and in a final author’s letter, that it becomes clear that the plot is a hallucination by the hero in the moment of opening a booby-trapped box, which he believes contains unlimited riches and which his partner-in-crime, Diviney, has secreted in the house of their murdered victim.
The protagonist, who forgets his own name, describes his life – including the acquisition of a wooden leg and how he came to depend on Diviney (shades of divinity?), who seems to have taken over his life after the death of his father – to the extent of being drawn into Diviney’s idea to murder a rich farmer, Mather (mother, madder?). It is described in a language of rich strangeness that could only come from a fellow countryman of Joyce. The author also explains the origin of his interest in the entirely fictional polymath and world-reformer, de Selby, who thereafter appears in a series of ever-weirder footnotes explaining his theories of everything from night (a secretion of noxious vapours) to hammering (the sound of tiny air-bladders bursting) in a mockery of academic scholarly writing, which I struggled through but actually found very funny.
Gulliver’s Travels may have been a source, with scientists engaged in bizarre experiments of extracting sunlight from cucumbers.
One cannot help thinking that the book would sound great in Irish brogue. The hero’s lyrical appreciation of the countryside, while coolly bent on a horrible murder, is expertly done and makes for quite a hilarious, if a little unsettling, impact. After the murder, again deftly described in a strangely sensuous and entirely value-free way, the hero is made to wait by Diviney for his share of the loot. He goes back to the house of the victim to search where Diviney planted the box of money, only to find the dead man alive and striking up a weird conversation with him. He also discovers – perhaps the only sane character in the book – Joe, the invisible voice of his conscience, who accompanies him throughout the rest of the book.
Unable to locate the box – seemingly – the hero takes a series of totally unusual steps. He goes to the police station to report the loss of an American watch. The station itself exists in a dimensionless building and the policeman, Sergeant Pluck, is a character of monstrous size and with a huge red moustache, whose one interest is in bicycles and refuses to believe that the hero is complaining about anything other than a bicycle theft. From that moment on the plot becomes bizarre, especially in playing around with all normal notions of time and space. A small box made by Sergeant Pluck has ever smaller boxes inside it, to the point where they are not just invisible to the naked eye but even through a microscope. O’Brien indulges in a glorious pastiche of the philosophical language of indiscernibility. Suddenly the hero is sentenced to the gallows, but not for the actual murder. In this connection, following an accidental map discovered on the ceiling of a room in the police station, he is taken to a shed, which turns out to be Eternity, and where – amidst a Piranesi-like chaos of tunnels and whirling cogs – he gets a ton of gold, only to find he cannot get it out of Eternity because, during his time in Eternity, by definition, nothing can change and therefore he can only leave with the same weight he came in.
Dragged to the scaffold, the hero manages his escape – on a bicycle of course – and goes to the house of his partner-in-crime, Diviney. Suddenly he finds the time is seventeen years later and no-one except Diviney, who believes he is a ghost, sees him. Diviney rants, Macbeth-like (there are some near-Macbeth quotes scattered throughout the book), that the hero must be dead as Diviney planted a booby trap in the box and saw with his own eyes the explosion that killed our hero. At which point the story wheels back again to the opening in the police station and it is clear the cycle(!) will be repeated forever. The whole mad story has been a hallucination at the moment of the hero’s death, but will continue repeating itself forever.
I found the de Selby passages rather convoluted. The dislocation of time and space is also unsettling, although the theory of the exchange of atoms between person and bicycle raised some smiles.
The background to this book is quintessentially Irish, with its own particular and probably indispensable drunken humour. It has a unique use of language, with passages of lyricism and pathos yielding to tongue-in-cheek logghorrea, and wonderful pastiche and mixtures of register – officialese, brogue, poetry and ramblings effortlessly fusing together. For this alone it is a worthwhile read.
– Golden Langur
An absorbing review of a most bizarre book, by your account! I lost track of time and space in reading it!
Thank you.
The humour is brilliant and the writing a literary roller coaster. I hope I’ve done it some justice.