At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inmates In Charge of the Asylum

Novelists are, of course, fraudsters. They make a living by telling lies just enough like the truth to be credible and passing that off as work. Of course it isn’t work, but mostly boozing and collecting daft comments made by other people, mostly other writers as it turns out. They even turn their plagiarism into a principle of artistic technique: “Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference.”

But even a fraud and layabout must sleep from time to time. And there’s the chance for the interchangeable characters to exert a bit of independent thinking. Tired of being trapped in insipid prose and tired plots, they can take a few literary initiatives of their own. They’re fed up with the braggadocio, fighting and womanising of the likes of Finn McCool and other Celtic heroes. And the outdated styles of Joyce, Beckett, Zane Grey, Eliot and Pound. They want quality; and they get it. Poetry that sings:

“When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When money's tight and is hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When health is bad and your heart feels strange, And your face is pale and wan, When doctors say that you need a change, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
“When food is scarce and your larder bare And no rashers grease your pan, When hunger grows as your meals are rare - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN”
“In time of trouble and lousy strife, You have still got a darlint plan, You still can turn to a brighter life - A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!”

And who would argue? To hell with King Sweeny and the whole lot o’ them ungainly fellers flying from glen to glen like giant fowl. We need new heroes, like that bloke who can long jump to beat the band. That Jumping Irishman is a world-beater. And let’s not forget the merits of the Good Fairy, a wraith not be confused with your run of the mill leprechauns who don’t give nearly such good advice.

The trick is to keep these writing blokes unconscious. “We must invert our conception of repose and activity... We should not sleep to recover the energy expended when awake but rather wake occasionally to defecate the unwanted energy that sleep engenders.” That way novels would be in the hands of the experts, not the amateur wannabes with nothing new worth writing about.

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