The Third Policeman

"There are two police barracks in the book. The first one doesn’t seem to be implausible as a physical situation. But the second one, which comes in later, is built between an interior and an exterior shell of a house. Beyond this, the landscape of the book isn’t particularly absurd – it’s somehow very conventional, and the countryside is described as beautiful, and pleasant. It’s when you get down to the details that things become disturbing – like the policeman who the protagonist meets in the first barracks who is assembling a series of boxes, each one smaller than the next until he gets to ones that are so small he can only work on them with microscopic tools under a magnifying glass. Yes, O’Brien is very good at this combination of the familiar and the horrifying. Like Daniil Kharms, O’Nolan had many pseudonyms. He wrote in Irish too, and he had pseudonyms in both languages, perhaps expressing a cultural discomfort. He said he thought it was ridiculous for an author to write everything under one name. It’s only one of them… O’Brien’s writing has all sort of targets. One of my favourites (to go back to encyclopaedias etc) is his creation of the philosopher de Selby, a character who never appears directly in the text, only in the anti-hero’s obsession with his works, and the heavily footnoted battles between de Selby’s critics and biographers. Sadly the Wikipedia page on de Selby gives away that he’s a fictional creation."

"I thought about this book all the time while I was writing To Be a Machine . This may be just the result that I think about Flann O’Brien an awful lot anyway. My master’s thesis was comparative study of Flann O’Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. These are two writers who I think have an incredible amount in common. Borges was a huge fan of O’Brien. So, I have been obsessed for a long time with O’Brien generally and The Third Policeman in particular. What links it with transhumanism in my mind is that a big part of the experience of writing that book for me was meeting people who were incredibly smart and extremely logical. I would be sitting and listening to these really smart people explaining their ideas to me in what seemed to be really rigorous logical lockstep movements. At a certain point, I would step back and my mind would be blown. I would think this seems to be pure logic all the way, but where it’s leading is to a place of absolute absurdity. There’s a scene in The Third Policemen where one of the policemen takes the narrator into a back room and shows him all the projects he’s been working on, like the infinite series of boxes that keep getting smaller and smaller. And there’s the spear with the tip that’s so small that you can’t see it, where the point is like a foot beyond the point of visibility. The writer is having his mind blown by this. I talked to my editor about this, about how there’s something culturally Irish, but not uniquely Irish, of using logic against itself — of exposing the absurdity that’s inherent in logic, if you know what I mean —that he does incredibly well. Swift did it amazingly as well, as did Beckett, but I think Flann O’Brien really takes it to the limit with that book. O’Brien was intrigued by Relativity and related ideas in physics that were current at the time when he was writing. I think he was interested in them not primarily for science reasons but because he saw in them the potential for comic absurdity. At the risk of sounding pretentious, that’s kind of where my interest in transhumanism comes from. I’m interested in the science, obviously, but that’s not my primary concern. It’s the potential for absurdity and the potential for exposing the weird absurdity that’s inherent in an extreme rationalist view of the world. I think that’s true. When I was writing the book, part of my suspicion about transhumanism was that maybe all of this is just the result of men who are spending way too much time with technology. With these people who spend too much time around computers, being in the matrix of computers, and thinking in the language of programming and so on, the boundary between the machine and the person — the self — begins to blur. In exactly the same way, in The Third Policeman you have men riding bicycles, and the molecules start to get confused and you get these half-men half-bicycles. And also, The Third Policeman is this overwhelmingly, stultifyingly male environment. It’s marked by the complete absence of women. Yes, it’s overwhelmingly a male environment. That’s a really interesting question. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m not entirely sure whether the maleness of transhumanism is just in keeping with the general maleness of the tech-world or of Silicon Valley, or something else. I suspect that there is something about the delusion of transcending the body — of becoming a pure rational being — that is an specifically, or at least overwhelmingly, male delusion. Yes. I’m wary of essentialising but, for whatever reason, women seem to be much less susceptible to this idea. I met a few. At a certain point I realised, ‘hey, I’m just writing about men. This is a sausage-fest of a book and I needed to address that somewhat.’ So, I met with Natasha Vita-More and I write about it in the book. She’s a fairly prominent figure in transhumanism. She’s the president of the Transhumanist Association and she’s got really interesting ideas about the future of the body and so on. I also met Laura Deming, who probably wouldn’t describe herself as a transhumanist or would not want to be described as such. She’s the shockingly young woman who runs the life extension venture capital fund, which is funded by Peter Thiel. There were also women I met for the book who I didn’t end up writing about, just because they weren’t quite as strong characters as some of the others. In general, it’s an extremely male movement in a way that is probably, to be fair, more extreme than the tech world in general. If you go to any of the meeting and you look around you think, Jesus, where are the women at?"