The third policeman

p. 20
“The the eyes were horrible. Looking at them I got the feeling that they were not genuine eyes at all but mechanical dummies animated by electricity or the like, with a tiny pinhole in the centre of the ‘pupil' through which the real eye gazed secretively and with great coldness. Such a conception, possibly, with no foundation at all in fact, disturbed me agonisingly and gave rise in my mind to interminable speculations as to the colour and quality of the real eye and as to whether, indeed, it was real at all or merely another dummy with its pinhole on the same plane as the first one so that the real eye, possibly behind thousands of these absurd disguises, gazed out through a barrel of serried peep-holes.”

“‘Not hens' piniony under-wing feeling?' I questioned keenly. The Sergeant shook his head abstractedly.”

“‘It is nearly an insoluble pancake,' he smiled, ‘a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.'”

I found this book rather strange. While I really enjoyed many of the scientific concepts around time, space, relativity and atomic theory contained in it, I found it a really hard slog to get through. However, despite finding it a hard slog I never considered abandoning it and I was determined to finish it. There were parts of the book that had me captivated while I found other parts just dragged on. The good parts kept me going but the slow parts really took away from my overall enjoyment of the novel.

I suspect the writers of Father Ted were fans of O'Brien : the name-guessing sequences definitely rang a bell. There's a good reason for the illogical craziness, which was probably a very unusual plot device at the time of writing. I didn't think I was in the mood for a surreal story, but this has stuck with me and will definitely bear re-reading. A note for those students obliged to read this novel and not enjoying the surrealness : just let it wash over you like it's a weird dream, without making any attempt to make sense of it.