The short fiction of Flann O'Brien

IN so lovingly collecting and editing Flann O'Brien's widely scattered and almost forgotten short fiction, Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper have done the study of Irish literature a great service. They've also done a lot of detective work; the man born Brian O'Nolan, in Strabane, in 1911, published secretively, under a string of pseudonyms, in two languages. Several of these pieces had never been republished. Presented in chronological order, the work follows the familiar trajectory of O'Brien's career, reinforcing rather than rewriting the standard view of him. His juvenilia is precociously brilliant; he achieves mastery early, declines early, and by the end of his short, alcoholic life is writing material that damages rather than enhances his reputation. The casual reader, unfamiliar with Flann O'Brien, would still be advised to start with the three great novels: "At Swim-Two-Birds," "The Third Policeman" and "An Béal Bocht" (translated as "The Poor Mouth"). Modernist, meta and exuberantly comic, they are masterpieces of world literature. All three confidently dance along a high wire of language, strung between the broken tower of Ireland's lost Gaelic culture and the unfinished skyscraper of its postcolonial future (far above the indifferent bog of the actual country). His shorter works do not achieve those heights. Nevertheless, for the dedicated Flanneur, there is much that is new and interesting. The book begins with five works originally written in ebullient, alarmingly postmodern Irish in the 1930s (four of them never reprinted). Jack Fennell has done an excellent job of translating them into English (though he alerts us, in amusingly despairing footnotes, to several jokes that have proved untranslatable). Several of the pieces are, rather startlingly, works of science fiction. In "Revenge on the English in the Year 2032!," English is almost extinct, and Irish is the global language. O'Brien pretends to satirize the English, while actually satirizing the excesses of the Irish nationalists. In the middle of the book are a couple of shaggy dog stories with dark cores. The strongest, "John Duffy's Brother," is on one level a comic tale of a man who wakes up one morning believing himself a train, and who choo-choos into work in that condition. On another level, it is a fine, grim tale of a man suffering a nervous breakdown, telling no one, and recovering. Several of the late, minor stories, like the slight but touching "Donabate," are about drinking - more accurately, about being an alcoholic - in Dublin. A number involve the Puritan licensing laws of a Dionysian republic. The book officially ends with the 41 surviving pages of "Slattery's Sago Saga," the novel O'Brien was writing when he died in 1966 (at age 54). The story, a misogynistic mess, never achieves takeoff. Tucked away in an appendix (for its provenance has not yet been established beyond all doubt) is the most surprising of these tales: an amusing pulp science fiction story published in 1932, in Amazing Stories Quarterly, under the name John Shamus O'Donnell. In it, a widowed American missionary commissions an inventor to build a robot replica of his lost wife. It seems to me, clearly, to be early Flann O'Brien. Did he have yet another secret life, under yet another set of pseudonyms, as a pulp writer? O'Brien did not have the ego of Joyce or the resilience of Beckett. His refusal to see himself as an artist at first enabled, then destroyed, his talent. It opened him up to all the influences of his uneasily modern age, from Irish hardship memoirs to American pulp. But without a core of self-belief, he wrote to the level the publisher expected. Writing the early novels he wrote to the level of Joyce, and attained it; writing for The Irish Digest, he wrote to the level of the average writer in The Irish Digest, and attained it. This book does, however, have the great virtue of hauling O'Brien out from under the shadow of Joyce and Beckett. We see here a complicated modern writer; disheveled, hung over, restless, frustrated and, occasionally, very funny indeed. JULIAN GOUGH is the author of "Juno and Juliet" and the "Jude" novel sequence.

Irish late modernist writer O'Brien (The Third Policeman, At Swim Two Birds, The Poor Mouth) wrote in Gaelic under the name Brian O Nuallain, and in English as Brother Barnabus, Myles na gCopaleen, Lir O'Connor, and Brian Nolan, among others. This present collection contains work from many of these known pseudonymns, with Gaelic stories in translation, as well as the unfinished novel, Slattery's Sago Saga. The variety taken together displays a playful, sardonic voice that is charmingly self-conscious in its invention. In "Scenes in a Novel," for instance, O'Brien's narrator is an author who must reckon with the rebellious characters of a novel he is writing, particularly his anti-hero Carruthers McDaid, "a man.created one night when [he] had swallowed nine stouts and [was feeling] vaguely blasphemous." The story "Two in One" is narrated by Murphy, a taxidermist's assistant who attempts to hide the murder of his boss by wearing the deceased's skin, eventually fusing with it, only to be imprisoned for the crime of killing himself. Mirroring his own ambiguous approach to identity, a myriad cast of characters and voices seem to all jostle for attention, delightful in their assurance that "[n]ot everything in [a] story is as unbelievable as it may seem." (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.