Inner Circles

THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien. 200 pages. Walker. $4.95.

Flann O'Brien was an eccentric Irish man caught up in the confusion of three identities. Under his real name, Brian O'Nolan, he was an Irish civil servant. As Myles na gCopaleen, he was a columnist for the Irish Times and wrote the contemporary Gaelic classic An Beal Bocht (The Poor Mouth). But it was as the pseudonymous Flann O'Brien, the author of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), that he was best known.

That brilliant comic curio--a novel about a student who is writing a novel --attracted praise from the likes of James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. Despite the raves, Flann O'Brien was to be the victim of his own creation. Generally acknowledged as the pretender to the Joycean mantle, he was pursued by the ever lengthening shadow of his own early genius.

O'Brien wrote two later novels, The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive, and though both were treated respectfully by the critics, both were compared unfavorably with what had come to be regarded as his masterpiece. When O'Brien died at the age of 54 in 1966, he was consigned to literary rest as just one more author whose early promise had never been quite fulfilled.

The Third Policeman, written in 1940 and published now for the first time in the U.S., proves belatedly that Flann O'Brien was not a one-good-book man or even James Joyce's man for that matter. He was simply very much his own man with an effervescent comic talent.

Like the best Irish writers, he was melodious even when he was clearing his throat; he was nothing less than dazzling when he performed in all his Sunday finery.

Five Rules. In literature, dead men do tell tales. And the narrator-hero--or ante-anti-hero--of this novel has been murdered by his accomplice in another killing. He wanders through an eternity of hell for three days before returning to earth, where 16 years have passed, thus giving his now aged accomplice the fright that takes his life. But to say that this is what The Third Policeman is about is like saying that Hamlet is a play about a fellow who can't get along with his stepfather.

The book is endlessly involved with worlds within worlds. Its hell goes round and round, contains ring within ring al most in the mode first cast by Dante.

But there is a singular difference: it is literally funny as hell too. Everyone, for example, is obsessed by bicycles -- since it is generally accepted in hell that bicycles tend to assume the personalities of their riders. Even the five rules of Satan ic wisdom get involved with cycling:

"Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own ad vantage. Always carry a repair outfit.

Take left turns as much as possible.

Never apply your front brake first."

Reflections. While the author is creating a miniworld out of a netherworld, he is further embellishing his recurring theme. For to O'Brien, everything seems always to come full circle but always within another circle, thus leaving man no way out, but simply an ever diminishing area of containment. His elusive bull's-eye view of eternity is further complicated by his theory on the na ture of time. "If a man stands before a mirror," he argues playfully, "what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. There is an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a, glance at his own face in a mirror aria the registration of the reflected image in his eye."

It is all as maddening and dizzying, as heady and exhilarating, as a discus sion near closing time in a Dublin pub.

The arguments don't always make sense, and they often seem more like simplistic refractions than logical expressions, but the language is a constant joy, the wit is rich and winning, and the company is charming.

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