THE THIRD POLICEMAN

by Flann O'Brien

Synopsis: The basic idea is that a young guy, down on his luck in rural Ireland, one night aids and abets another guy in killing and robbing a rich old dude. They hide the money in a box at the old guy’s house and come back 3 months later to collect it and weird stuff happens. The main character is confronted by the old guy he helped kill and then he goes to a police station and has nonsensical conversations with two policemen there for the remaining 3/4 of the book. The first bit was OK, but the conversations with the police were terrible to read, just silly, absurd dialogue that makes no sense. It was so tedious that I found myself just skimming the last 100 pages. Apparently, the big concept is that the main character was dead the whole time and this is his hell, his punishment for his part in the murder – to sit through an eternity of irrational discussions with ridiculous policemen.

How it relates to Lost: In Season 2, Desmond is reading this when the hatch is infiltrated by the crash survivors. While Lost writers indicate this book is highly important, I found very few explicit links between the two. The only clear item is that when the main character recovers the money box he hid, it doesn’t contain money, but a mysterious substance ‘omnium’, which can transform into whatever one desires. Similar concepts are spoken of between Ben and Locke in “The Man from Tallahassee”. Also, in the book, the policemen are constantly taking readings from an underground bunker (not really explained any more than that) and having to adjust those readings into a safe range – the third policeman is secretly modifying the readings to unsafe ranges just to screw around with the other policemen. This kind of sounds like the hatch and the counter. The scene where the main character confronts the old man he killed was very reminiscient of Locke’s encounter with Jacob. I really didn’t find anything enlightening here and it wasn’t a good read either.