At Swim-Two-Birds

 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien is a slim, bizarre work of metafiction that is about four decades ahead of its time. Released just before World War Two, it would seem to be late Modernism, but by my judgment fits much more squarely into the height of Postmodernism. Briefly, the "plot" of the novel involves a lazy student working on a novel about a writer of other novels whose characters eventually revolt against the fictional writer. Throughout, random Irish folk heroes dip in and out of the scenes, and the student's uncle-landlord hectors him about his studies. The student narrator feels like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. The setting and voice evoke James Joyce. But the structure--in metafiction and especially in collage-like asides--anticipates Donald Barthelme more than these two. There is a late scene where a conversation devolves into dissociative science jargon, where "the following terms relating to the science of medicine were used with surprising frequency, videlicet, chyme, exophthalmus, scirrhus, and mycetoma meaning respectively food when acted upon by gastric juices and converted into acid pulp, protrusion of the eyeball, hard malignant tumour . . ." Barthelme admired O'Brien, and his haphazard, cut-and-paste stories from across genre echo this strange novel. 

So what to make of this anachronistic little book? I was mostly entertained, if mildly irritated in places. It's a ridiculous, slapdash novel. While most of the dialogue and characterization is endearingly silly, the "plot" meanders so wildly that you can almost feel a five-page stretch into nonsense coming. This is also funny, but the joke is on the reader. How many bad Irish poems can you read before closing the book? How seriously should you care about a work-within-a-work's character and his quest for revenge? Where in the world is this thing going? As it happens, the ending was satisfying, and well executed. O'Brien, for all his absurdity, can write. Overblown and windy, the descriptions were still often beautiful. Now that I know where the novel is headed, I think I will reread At Swim-Two-Birds. On its own risible terms, it's a worthwhile experience.