Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan, was a Irish Civil Servant with a penchant for fiction.
It appeared as an innocuous bit of Irish culture. It was quoted in The GAA: An Oral History. It simply kept showing up. So I went ahead and checked At-Swim-Two-Birds out of the library with the intention of reading it. And only then did I begin to understand the complexities involved with such a task.
At-Swim-Two-Birds is by convention (or lack of a more appropriate designation) a novel. Yet, in it’s fierce desire to consume its own mission as a novel by layering narrative realities upon one another, it is more aptly a work of “meta-fiction.” Which is to say the novel is more concerned with fiction becoming aware of itself than telling any certain story.
Of the stories that At-Swim-Two-Birds does manage to tell, quite a few of them required some further contextualization. Drawing unannounced and frequently on Irish Mythology, Flann O’Brien’s book (re) tells the stories of Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney. These characters are drawn against their will into a the construction of a novel by an author called Trellis, who is actually the creation of the story’s protagonist, a lazy college student second-guessing his own attempts to write a modern novel. Put simply, At-Swim-Two-Birds is what happened to Irish literature once it was firmly accepted by the population that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a work of genius. Which is to say, this is the child of the insanity after the insanity.
Despite its complexities, or perhaps because of them, I adored reading through this book, and thought secretly throughout the process what a wonderfully insane movie it could make. My personal hopes were that a man like Terry Gilliam might try an adaptation for I think its zany humor and meta-aspirations would suit him. But I recently learned, with equal joy, that Brendan Gleeson of my all-time favorite In Bruges and Gangs of New York (and Harry Potter as Mad-Eye Moody) is currently finishing a script of film adaptation and hopes to begin shooting his adaptation this fall. I, for one, look forward to seeing the results of that effort.
