Likewise he must hide beneath a twig, or behind a dried leaf, or under a red stone, or vanish at full speed into the seat of his hempen drawers without changing his course or abating his pace or angering the men of Erin. When pursued by a host, he must stick a spear in the world and hide behind it and vanish in its narrow shelter or he is not taken for want of sorcery. Here’s a snippet (a long one!), featuring Finn on the ideal man: Much of the early part of At Swim-Two-Birds features Finn Mac Cool holding forth on all matters Irish in wonderfully baroque and hyperbolic passages.

The third opening offers up Finn Mac Cool, “a legendary hero of old Ireland.” Then, there’s John Furriskey, who “was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it.” Furriskey is the literary creation of another of the narrator’s literary creations, one Dermot Trellis, a grumpy old man who writes Westerns Trellis (an author, it’s worth reiterating) is the eventual antagonist of the novel, the target for all of the other characters’ vengeance. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.įirst, we meet “Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class,” a hobgoblin of Irish folklore (he turns out to be a thoughtful and polite fellow). One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. The book’s opening paragraph announces the novel’s intention to disregard the classical unities of action, place, and time: These projects, our narrator’s riffs and scribblings, begin to take on lives of their own: they intersect, overlap, intermarry, degenerate and regenerate. Our narrator likes to imbibe large quantities of porter and wax philosophical with his friends about his literary projects.

We have an unnamed narrator, a student living with his uncle who doesn’t think much of how his nephew spends his time. Summarizing At Swim-Two-Birds is difficult but worth attempting.

First published in 1939-the same year as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake- At Swim-Two-Birds seems light years ahead of its time-indeed, this is a book that is still ahead of its time. This novel overflows with stories its plot threads twist into each other, break out of each other, erupt into new ideas, characters, riffs, sketches. The vibrant force of storytelling in Flann O’Brien’s excellent first novel At Swim-Two-Birds threatens to overwhelm reader and narrator alike-and what a strange joy it is to be overwhelmed.

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien