Here's a nice bit of literary serendipity: going through old college books recently, I came across The Dalkey Archive, Flann O'Brien's novel about nuclear physics, James Joyce's religious transfiguration and men who turn into bicycles.
Rereading it ahead of the centenary of the birth of Brian O'Nolan – the Tyrone-born civil servant who became Flann, legendary Dublin wit – I was transported back to my days as an English Lit undergrad. And I was reminded of how important, and pleasurable, his work was to me and many others.
Being Irish, and dreaming of being a writer, three names loomed in my consciousness then like dark monoliths: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann. Yeats was a bit flakey, too far in the past; Wilde more of an artistic statement than an artist. But those first three were the benchmark, the ones to emulate. Beckett was the cool one you wanted to be, the embodiment of all your Left Bank reveries; Joyce the towering but somehow dislikeable genius you wanted to surpass, however impossible that seemed. Then there was Flann.
While his was the lesser talent, by a fraction, it's interesting that he's the one most likely to be read, and especially reread, today. I studied Joyce and Beckett – but I read Flann. I appreciated the first two – but enjoyed Flann. I admired the somewhat formal, and sometimes intimidating, experimentalism of Joyce and Beckett – but I, and my friends, loved Flann.
We read him alone in our rooms, then discussed him collectively in the pub, quoting our favourite bits with the same enthusiasm and fondness as for Pearl Jam lyrics or Harry Enfield sketches. "Buff-coloured puke" didn't just refer to the likely hue of our post-binge regurgitations – it was our Flann-fan catchphrase, the most memorable of countless such lines from At Swim-Two-Birds.
Indeed our devotion to that book embodied something quite Flann-esque: feckless students wasting their time by drinking and chatting about a feckless student wasting his time by drinking and chatting, et cetera, et cetera ... It was all very self-reflexive and postmodern, which is appropriate. Flann may not have invented postmodernism in literature (my fellow Tipperaryman, Laurence Sterne, was deconstructing Tristram Shandy even as he constructed it, way back in 1759), but he did it better than perhaps anybody else, before or since. I think that's why he's still read nowadays, and more widely than during his lifetime, when he was rather underappreciated (it's still barely conceivable that the magnificent The Third Policeman couldn't find a publisher until after death).
His writing was so innovative that it couldn't be comfortably processed by the culture of its creation. It's different now; his works chime better with our sensibilities. You could easily imagine the novels, or the Myles na Gopaleen newspaper columns, being written today. There's a familiar sarcasm and cynicism, a controlled absurdity, an awareness of the ridiculousness and power of the media; and of course, that maelstrom of self-reflexive gags and delirious punning and bookish allusions and cultural riffs.
Two things, in particular, forever bound my literary heart to Flann. First, his absolutely incandescent use of language. I loved how he simultaneously pastiched and paid homage to Hiberno-English, the language I spoke, with all its circumlocution and paradox and needless-but-wonderful flourishes. And unlike Joyce and Beckett, who of course used language in crazily inventive ways too, Flann was instantly accessible, comprehensible and funny. (Properly, laugh-out-loud funny, not just in-jokes so subtle you needed a microscope to spot them.)
And the second reason? Flann is an inspiration. He was both a great novelist and columnist, proving that they're not incompatible; and within both he wrote across a bewildering, thrilling range. The novels are realist and horror and comedy and SF and saga and more, often all at once; and the columns deserve equal status with any of his fiction. The skit about professional book-handlers, who make your library look like it's actually been read, is probably the most famous. But then there was the Catechism of Cliché, The Brother, Keats and Chapman, the Plain People of Ireland, the ventriloquists, the stopped clock, and always language, language, language: Irish, English, French, German, cod-Latin, real Latin, phonetic words, invented words, pure Flann fantasias of words ...
Ah, yeah. You couldn't beat the bit of Flann, in fairness. He was yer only man.