Counting the issue you are holding or reading online, there have been 67 issues of 365ink. I have written about books for 64 of them. Since the beginning I’ve tried to find a good reason to write about Flann O’Brien, and it’s taken me 63 issues to realize that Flann O’Brien’s writing is all the reason I need.

Let’s deal with his name first. His real name is Brian O’Nolan and he was absolutely nuts for pen names. He used them all the time and he used a lot of them. The two most famous are Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. As “Myles,” he wrote riotously funny columns for the Irish Times, sometimes in English and sometime in Irish. His family were Irish speakers and he learned English and Irish side by side growing up. He wrote An Beal Bocht, one of his five novels, in Irish, which is quite difficult to find nowadays in the original. The English translation, The Poor Mouth, is widely available.

O’Nolan’s father died very young and, as a result, young Brian became the family bread winner. He got a job as an Irish Government Civil Servant. Since most of his writing was satirical in nature, and since he was sending up a good number of the bigwigs in the government who were his bosses, the pen names became more of a job security issue than an affectation.

It was in that sort of an atmosphere that he wrote his first novel and decided to use Flann O’Brien as a pen name. O’Nolan grew to regret that choice, but he was stuck with Flann O’Brien, so all five of his novels were written under that name.

As is the case with many writers, the first novel is dazzling and O’Nolan was no exception. At Swim-Two-Birds is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and without a doubt one of the most important Irish novels ever written. James Joyce was a fan of O’Nolan’s to the point that Joyce read ASTB using a magnifying glass, his eyesight almost gone, and he allowed, I believe for the first and only time, a blurb of his to be used on the cover of the book. He said, “A real writer, with the true comic spirit, a really funny book.” It is rumored to be the last book Joyce read. As also is the case with many writers, Flann O’Brien’s first novel was a complete financial failure. It reportedly sold less than 300 copies, making the first edition of ASTB with a good dust jacket worth a small fortune, if you can find one. With all this talk of literary excellence, you might think ASTB is a stuffy piece of fiction, hard to read, and mindlessly boring. It isn’t. The prose moves like a hot knife through butter. The ease of his writing reminds me of Graham Greene, not in the style but in how it satisfies like a cold beer on a hot, humid summer day. Graham Greene, in fact, was instrumental in getting ASTB published. He was a reader in the publishing house that eventually published the book and it was his strong recommendation that resulted in ASTB coming out in 1939. He would later place ASTB on the same level with two of the greatest novels ever written in any language, Ulysses and Tristram Shandy.

The anonymous narrator in At Swim-Two-Birds decides, while having nothing better to do and being profoundly lazy, to write a novel. Being lazy, he doesn’t feel the need to go to the trouble to create any new characters since so many fine ones have already been created by writers much better than he. He resolves to borrow them for the occasion. With that, these characters turn the book into something of a Monty Python episode. At some point they start to take over the plot and foment a revolt against the narrator, whom they attempt to marginalize because they think he is doing a poor job, and some of the other characters who are taking up too much space in the novel.

ASTB is likely to be like nothing you have ever read unless you have read Tristram Shandy, the modern novels of Mark Danielewski or, more notably, Six Characters In Search Of An Author by Luigi Pirandello. Your enjoyment is sure to be enhanced if you know something of the Irish character and if you are aware of Irish myths and legends but it isn’t necessary for countless belly laughs.

Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien wrote a second novel right after completing ASTB and it remained unpublished until after his death. It’s called The Third Policeman and it has garnered almost as much critical acclaim as ASTB. I mention it because if you like ASTB, then read The Third Policeman. It is a murder mystery that is nothing short of mind boggling. It will leave you slack jawed and wide eyed.

It is, nonetheless, a good idea to start with At Swim-Two-Birds for no other reason that the one mentioned in this recommendation by the great Irish poet Dylan Thomas. “This is just the book to give to your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl,” and that’s all that needs to be said!