Gardai start to imitate O’Brien’s surreal fiction

IHAVE long felt that of the great Irish writers, Oscar Wilde is the one who was most ahead of his time. His war against what we call “conventional wisdom”, the way that he would overturn some widely accepted platitude to demonstrate that the opposite was indeed true, makes him a visionary of the modern world as well as his own.

But in the last few weeks, Flann O’Brien has surely come steaming through the field to challenge Wilde, not just in the depth of his perceptions, but in the virtual prophesy which, it is now clear, was running through much of his work in the area of policing.

The Third Policeman in particular must now be seen, not as an impossibly strange vision of the gardai as they might exist in some alternative world of the author’s imagining, but as a kind of unofficial guidebook to the workings of the force in real life, in real time in the present day.

So strange indeed did that book seem to potential publishers, it existed only in manuscript form until after the author’s death, its contents considered just a bit too crazy for the general reader to accept.

Essentially, after his brilliant debut At SwimTwo-Birds, publishers had wanted a bit less of the “surrealism”, and all he could give them was more of it, and more on top of that.

They did not understand, that by the year 2017 the actual police force of the Republic of Ireland would have embraced the vision of that tormented writer to such an extent they were starting to match him and even at times to pass him out in the game of experimental fiction.

Underneath the barracks in The Third Policeman there is this large chamber called Eternity in which, by the most chilling summation, “time stands still, mysterious numbers are devoutly recorded and worried about by the policemen, and a box from which anything you desire can be produced”.

Then again throughout O’Brien’s body of work there is this sense of the gardai being engaged in esoteric pursuits which have nothing much to do with routine police work, devoting themselves instead to obsessive relationships with their bicycles, pondering the “molecular theory”, whereby man and bicycle eventually merge as one.

In an atmosphere of such intense enquiry, even a million inexplicable breathtests must seem like a mere footnote to the greater project on which they have embarked. Whatever it is.

Certainly it seems to have very little to do with mundane issues of law enforcement. For years, we used to wonder about things like the apparent absence of gardai from parts of Dublin’s inner city in which dangerous drugs were being openly sold all day.

Now we realise they were in the underground chamber, so to speak, inventing this mad other world in which they are always busy. But they do not exist entirely in their own imagination, or that of the people.

We see them when a murder has been committed, for example, and they’ve actually caught a fair few murderers over the years; but then that is surely the most enjoyable part of the job — in this alternative version of reality which they inhabit they can pretend that they’re like the detectives on the TV, it’s a release from the tyranny of the numbers and it’s a win all round.

Not so enjoyable are the gangland killings and the organised crime in general, either of the violent or the white-collar variety. Certainly if any of us had to choose between pretending to do breath-tests, and actually doing something that is either quite dangerous or unbelievably boring, we would keep not doing the breath-tests, happy in that world of make-believe.

And if you live deep in rural Ireland, the notion that a policeman might somehow intervene to stop you being burgled or brutalised at dead of night has long been consigned to the realm of the absurd.

With my own eyes, I saw a sign outside a garda station in a country village, informing the public that a garda would be available at the station at a specific time the following day, for about three hours. I was just glad I wasn’t a criminal, or I might have seen a bit of an opening there.

But it’s relatively easy to find a garda for some bureaucratic task such as having your passport renewed. You just call in to the station and you’ll probably find one soon enough, processing your documents on one screen and entering a few more mysterious numbers into the maw of Eternity on the other.

They are to be found in quite large numbers, too, in the vicinity of Gaelic football and hurling matches, or playing the game like Aidan O’Mahony, or indeed participating in Dancing With The Stars, like Aidan O’Mahony.

And in that space between the shadowland, which is their true home, and the real world, you’ll find them unseen on the side of the road in detector vans, loading the old penalty points on to perfectly good, safe drivers who may or may not be notified of this.

Or could it be, that there is nobody in those vans at all? Or that there used to be, but that the exchange of molecules over time between man and van has resulted in the creation of this thing which is all van?

Anything… truly anything… is possible.

‘Could it be that there is nobody in those detector vans at all?’