At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (The Complete Novels)

One beginning and one ending
for a book was a thing I
did not agree with

I sincerely thought I’d read this book before – I’ve had it for years, and certainly had the impression it was already done for me (York notes have a lot to answer for). But since I’d made a rash promise to find my copy and re-read it in the comments section somewhere on this blog, I picked it up again and gave it a whirl.

Yaddah yaddah, assume all the backstory has been covered, we’re good to go on the insight and reaction, right? Right?

Argh, ok, so written in the 30s by Brian O’Nolan, under a pseudonym he used to hoax newspapers, Graham Greene was involved somehow, it barely sold, lots of copies destroyed in Luftwaffe raids, had to be championed by various literary figures to be republished, now one of English literature’s top 100 books of all time. Oh, and he invented metafiction before Italo Calvino.

OK now?

Right, so Adam Thirlwell says, on the Goldsmiths Fantasy Prize website (where previous winners of the prize, judges, and mates who needed some exposure propose hypothetical historical prize winners since 1759*), that:

There’s something about stagnation and a feeling that life is elsewhere which seems to lend itself to metafiction, and O’Brien’s great novel of laziness is a masterpiece of inside-out structure. Delighted, destructive, it swaps styles the way a magician changes tricks. All other novels seem needlessly overweight afterwards. 

I would query that last sentence. I was lost and overloaded, rather than mesmerised, by the switching of narrative voices and styles, except where it was totally unmistakeable – the unnamed narrator’s conflict with his uncle is one example – and of some of the Irish literary and mythological references I was aware but not informed, so it went straight over my head. That might be to do with my near maniacal desire to consume literature rather than to read and digest at length, but it might also be because it’s hard to keep up.

For context, the story is framed by the aforementioned unnamed narrator who is a literature student of no small indolence and whose days are spent drinking porter and stout in pubs and fiddling with the writing of a novel rather than working towards his degree. He lives with his uncle while at university and their relationship is spiky at best. However, it is his novel which kicks off the other three storylines of the book. They are as follows:

1. The story of Pooka MacPhellimey, who in this case I believe is a demon or devil of sorts (I had to look up Pooka to be sure and it has lots of different definitions across Western and Northern Europe).

2. The story of John Furriskey, who is himself a fictional character devised by Dermot Trellis, a fictional author of western novels and whose other characters start to bleed into the first and third stories.

3. The story of Finn Mac Cool and Mad Sweeney, legends of early Irish literature – the titular place name in Middle Irish is Snám dá Én and refers to a ford over which Sweeney travels in Irish folklore

That all seems straightforward, right, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. The characters from each narrative converge and conspire to overthrow the fictional power or fictional author Trellis; there’s a baby born whose name escapes me and who takes to writing his own novel in which Trellis is tried and killed but before that can happen the unnamed student narrator passes his exams and if memory serves gets himself a job with his uncle, and the unfinished story is burned, by a fictional maid in Trellis’s fictional hotel, the Red Swan (no doubt a name loaded with missed significance), releasing fictional author Trellis from his fictional captors.

I’ve been told it’s a Menippean satire, in so far as many of the ideals espoused by characters are lampoons of themselves. I caught the glint of smiling Irish eyes, if that’s not a racist stereotype, in places, but I often felt I was the fool being fooled, and maybe feeling defensive isn’t a place from which to approach the broader satire of the novel. One thing I do wish is that I could have been taught this stuff in school or university. I wish I had read this before starting on my metafictional journey with Richard Brautigan’s A Sombrero Fallout, Italo Calvino’s In The Name Of The Rose, and all of John Barth. And I wish I had asked someone to read this at the same time as me – I think competition would have sharpened my mind and made me concentrate more closely on what I was reading, and hopefully would have resulted in a better and more complete understanding.

That said, and assuming I live to be old enough to retire (not a foregone conclusion), this is a book that I will cart with me across move after move (as I attempt to get further and further away from the approaching bin fire) and return to when all I have is time left to dedicate to it. It has caught on the edges of my mind and imagine will return time and time again when I least expect it.

 

*Now there’s some seriously weird and messed up stuff on that page, but it’s all great stuff**, Russell Hoban, Anthony Burgess, Laurence Sterne***, and so on.

**Even so, fuck Ulysses.

***Yes, yes, it’s on my bedside table, don’t rush me.

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