At Swim-Two-Birds

First of all, let’s address the important question.  Why the hyphens?  The disappointingly mundane answer is Swim-Two-Birds is a place.  Frankly it’s a shame.  I was dying to know how birds swim.  It’s an odd book.  Reading it is a lot like being talked at by the old mad drunk in the pub.  You know the guy that I mean- the one with the jaundiced eyes who reeks of booze and spews bullshit stories about the time he met Princess Di.  The one everybody edges away from.  Unfortunately, there’s no way of edging away from a book and so the nonsense continues for 200 pages.  And we’re supposed to revel in this.  This is where I reach the crux of why I didn’t enjoy reading At Swim-Two-Birds.  I just didn’t get it. 

I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the Henry Miller-esque, “let’s sit around and get drunk without any plot development because we’re writers,” type of book.  This is definitely one of those but, worse than that, it seems to be channelling Ulysses.  I fucking hate Ulysses.  It’s not just the whole set in Dublin and nothing’s happening thing, either.  I think what Flann O’Brien’s going for is comedy modernism.  The result is dreadful poetry about flowers (“O leafy-oak, clumpy-leaved/ You are high above the trees…”) and extracts from stories about telling stories that are based on other stories written in different styles going nowhere.  I’m sure that there are some redeeming features to the book but I was so bored by it all, I didn’t notice them.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  O’Brien has a certain penchant for colons that I (punctuation nerd that I am) can totally get on board with.

I have a difficulty in taking the book seriously.  Part of this is because I just can’t tell if the book’s being serious or not.  There’s one point where it becomes wankily pretentious about the ability of the reader to know characters in books vs plays.  It’s insufferable and I’m only about 90% that it’s intentionally so.  One of the barriers to my taking the book seriously is the author’s photo.  O’Brien- or rather Brian O’Nolan, to use his real name- looks quite a lot like Bruce Campbell dressed as Al Capone.  It’s the same photo as is on his Wikipedia page.  Check it out if you don’t believe me.  It’s one hell of a chin.

Basically, I was unimpressed by the book.  Again, it’s probably not that bad but it’s everything I hate about modernism in one place.  The comedy elements also mean that these are over emphasised- so it kind of ends up being even more modernist than the standard fare which doesn’t help matters at all in endearing the book to me.  I get what O’Brien was going for and I think he got there; but it didn’t produce something that was particularly fun to read.

Up next time around is Nancy Mitford’s In Pursuit of Love.  I’m all done with work until after Christmas, so I’m hoping to get some serious reading done in the next ten days or so.