The book “The Third Policeman” is described as a dark comedy at the Dalkey Archive Press. But what's funny is that this 1940 book about a man and his bicycle is selling better than ever before.
The Guardian Unlimited says the surreal novel “features the interchanging of atoms between a man and his beloved bicycle…”
Nothing surreal here. I've exchanged atoms between my ankle and crank before, and I have a scar on my shin as proof of an atom interchange with my toeclips. I even have a painful childhood memory of an attempted atom exchange between the bike crossbar and my groin when the chain slipped on my Evans.
The book by Irish author Flann O'Brien gained sudden popularity with its brief appearance on the television series “Lost.” Everything means something in that cult show, so viewers have been buying the book to scour it for hidden meanings to the TV show. The scriptwriter has said the book was chosen very specifically for a reason.
The Guardian reports:
The Third Policemen sequence was broadcast in the US last autumn. “In three weeks we sold 15,000 copies – the same number as we'd sold in the last six years,” said Chad Post of the Centre for Book Culture, which publishes O'Brien's works in the US. The book's European publisher, HarperCollins, says it has noticed a surge in demand.
Although the book was written in 1940, publishers thought it too bizarre to bring into print, until 1967.
The story is narrated by a character who has carried out a murder. A running gag in the book satirises the then emerging science of nuclear physics, suggesting that police who spend too long riding over bumpy Irish roads may end up exchanging atoms with their bicycles.
One officer is said to be half man and half two-wheeler. Its circular plot ends, almost as it begins, with a distracted policeman inquiring: “Is it about a bicycle?”
Could the series “Lost” ultimately be about a bicycle? My friend who let me carry our TransAmerica maps would say the connection is very appropriate.
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