BOOK REPORT: At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

Title:                     At Swim-Two-Birds
Author:                 Flann O'Brien
                              (aka Brian O'Nolan)
Copyright Date: 1939

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars (over my head)

Backcover Description
Along with one or two books by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is the most famous (and infamous) of Irish novels published in the twentieth century.

A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading, he is composing a mischief-filled novel about Dermont Trellis, a second-rate author whose characters ultimately rebel against him and seek vengeance.  From drugging him as he sleeps to dropping the ceiling on his head, these figures of Irish myth make Trellis pay dearly for his bad writing.

Hilariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, opening up new possibilities for what can be done in fiction.  It is a true masterpiece of Irish literature

My Thoughts

I was really excited about reading this book.  It had all of the elements that, when used properly, can make for a really interesting read.  It had a very compelling structure (it is a great example of  meta-fiction); it was portrayed as wildly comic, and it was on several lists of recommended books.  Unfortunately, most of the humor was above my head, buried deep inside stories pulled from Irish folklore of which I was totally ignorant.

The structure of the book is great in theory.  Our unnamed narrator is a lazy college student who is writing a novel when not at a pub with his friends or sleeping.  His novel is about a lazy man, Dermont Trellis, who sits in bed all day writing bad novels. The characters he creates are just like real actors in that they play the role outlined in the script and when not a scene, they hang out like normal people do.  There are some American cowboys, there are several female leads, a few  villains, an Irish version of Puck from a Midsummer Night's Dream, and Finn McCool (Finn is a warrior of Ireland from long ago which folklore has turned into more hyperbole than human.), among others.  Some of characters fall in love, they play cards together, and otherwise sit around lamenting the work they must perform at the behest of Dermont. These characters get so fed up with the bad writing that they start to find ways to keep him asleep so they don't have worry about him writing.  Of course everything escalates to the point of the cast writing their own book making Dermont the actor in a play in which his character is dragged through a gauntlet of painful tortures.   It sounds pretty neat, huh?  Flann O'Brien does an excellent job making it easy to keep track of all of the nested layers, but as you will see below the content portrayed within these layers was just too foreign to me. 

Every time I told someone about this book, the first question was, "What does the title mean?"  Swim-Two-Birds is a ford on the River Shannon in Ireland where one of the mythical characters, King Sweeney, visits briefly.  This is the same ford that St. Patrick used to cross the river Shannon.  I don't know why it was important for St. Patrick to cross at this ford, but it is one of its claims to fame.

For those with intimate knowledge of Irish folklore, you know that King Sweeney, also known as "Mad Sweeney" is a Irish king of yore that was cursed by a bishop after Sweeney tried to kill him when the church bells woke him up one morning.   This curse turned Sweeney into an insane man-bird flying around all of Ireland for years until he was finally forgiven. Then he was killed by a spear.  Please, go ahead and read those sentences again.  This is just the beginning of how over-my-head this novel was.  I looked up Mad King Sweeney on Wikipedia just to get a context of the story being told but never really understood *why* it was being told.  

After a while I stopped trying to dig up every reference to Irish folklore and just pushed through it. Most of the humor was lost on me and I found myself unable to read the book for longer than twenty or thirty minutes before I would compulsively (sometimes mid-sentence) play a game on my phone, or just go to sleep.

At Swim-Two-Birds also changes style throughout the book. I counted at least seven distinct writing styles and there were probably more that I just didn't notice.  These styles are meant to parody other famous Irish novels and folktales. Unfortunately for me, I haven't read any of the source materials and this layer was lost on me.  I read several reviews of the book and the consensus was that if you are intimately familiar with these stories you can really see Flann's genius come through.  Oh, well.  I guess I need to take their word for it.

I was really hoping that I would like this book.  But, my ignorance of the minutiae of Irish folklore and literature kept me from completely immersing myself in the story.  I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone unless they could prove to me that they are very familiar with Irish literature.