The 100 best novels
written in English
No 64
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
Labyrinthine and multilayered, Flann O’Brien’s humorous debut is both a reflection on, and an exemplar of, the Irish novel
Monday 8 December 2014
F
lann O’Brien is an Irish writer with many aliases and parallel lives, a legend of the Irish literary scene in the generation after the death of James Joyce (No 46 in this series). As a student, he wrote as “Brother Barnabas”. As Brian O’Nolan, or Ó Nualláin, he worked for the Irish civil service until his retirement. As Myles na Gopaleen, he wrote, in English and Irish Gaelic, Cruiskeen Lawn, a weekly column, part satire, part exuberant blarney, for the Irish Times. As Flann O’Brien, he published one of the funniest first novels of the 20th century, At Swim-Two-Birds.
From a longer perspective, At Swim-Two-Birds, a mixture of autobiography, fantasy, farce and satire, is the love child of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, while also being a mad elegy for an Irish culture apparently threatened with oblivion.
Swim-Two-Birds is an Irish public house of the kind that is fast disappearing, the home of music, folklore and every kind of gossip, in poetry and prose, while also being the quotidian HQ of its narrator, who may or may not be an idle young Dublin student named Dermot Trellis. Our narrator, who likes to harangue the reader, and declares that “a good book may have three separate openings entirely dissimilar”, lives with his disapproving uncle, a grumpy Guinness employee.
“Tell me this,” his relative complains, “do you ever open a book at all?” Actually, our narrator is juggling all kinds of literature in his head. Beneath the top line of the story, a portrait of lower-middle-class Dublin inevitably influenced by Joyce, there is a novel-within-the-novel, the tale of John Furriskey, a young man “born at the age of twenty-five”, the work of “eccentric author Dermot Trellis” that quickly spins off into farcical riffs on Irish folklore, focused on the Celtic hero Finn MacCool, the Pooka MacPhellimey and two rustic nitwits, Lamont and Shanahan, loquacious cowhands.
From here on in, as the various characters gang up on Flann O’Brien’s various “authors”, At Swim-Two-Birds becomes what John Updike nailed as “a many-levelled travesty of a novel”, a description that would have delighted both Brian O’Nolan and Myles na Gopaleen.
A note on the text
It was Graham Greene, moonlighting as a reader for Longman’s, who first spotted the potential of an unsolicited manuscript, oddly titled At Swim-Two-Birds, just before the outbreak of the second world war, coincidentally the publication year of Finnegans Wake. The idea of a pseudonym came up in the contractual negotiations between author and publisher. O’Nolan wrote: “I have been thinking over the question of a pen-name and would suggest Flann O’Brien. I think this invention has the advantage that it contains an unusual name and one that is quite ordinary. ‘Flann’ is an old Irish name now rarely heard.”
The novel first appeared on 13 March 1939, but sold barely 200 copies in the first few months of publication. In 1940, Paternoster Row, the London home of many publishers, was destroyed by bombing. Longman’s warehouse, containing the unsold copies of the novel, was reduced to smoking rubble. O’Nolan would later claim that Hitler hated his work so much he had contrived the second world war to stop it.
Generally, however, the reviews were poor, and the book was sustained by the enthusiastic support of writers such as Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas. The latter came up with a line that for many years adorned various paperback reprints: “This is just the book to give your sister – if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” Another champion was Jorge Luis Borges who, in 1939, described Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece in the following terms: “I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds… [which] is not only a labyrinth, [but also] a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which parody all the styles of Ireland.”
Borges went on to note that “the magisterial influence of Joyce… is undeniable, but not disproportionate”.
After the war, in America, At Swim-Two-Birds was republished by Pantheon Books in 1950, but sales remained low. Longman’s, meanwhile, had turned down O’Nolan’s second novel, The Third Policeman, to his great dismay. This would not be published, posthumously, until 1968. Previously, in May 1959, a now defunct London publishing house MacGibbon & Kee, persuaded O’Nolan to allow them to reissue At Swim-Two-Birds. Thereafter, the novel was taken up by Penguin Books, which was the edition I first read in 1971, an unforgettable moment.
Three more from Flann O’Brien
The Third Policeman (1968); The Hard Life (1962); The Dalkey Archive (1964).
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)
059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
061 Murphy by Samuel Beckett ( 1938)
062 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
063 Party Going by Henry Green (1939)
064 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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