Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 9: At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien (1938)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

At Swim Two Birds was more a book to be read as a concept than as a story for me. There is a story being written within the story and we are introduced to the three characters in the story being composed: Pooka MacPhellimey a devil, John Furriskey a character who emerges from the writing of the fictional writer Dermot Trellis, and adaptations of Irish legends mainly Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney. Yet, there are significant breaks where the writer introduces the writer of this story as a college student living with his bachelor uncle, rarely attending class, drinking stout with his buddies, and laying in bed. There is a strange, disjointed nature to the novel because of this back and forth between observation of the writer/narrator reality, for example pausing to describe the color of a persons suit or attitude, and the occasional glimpses into the story of the characters. As a concept I can appreciate the attempt to transcend the boundaries of the literary genre and the walls between the artist and the art. As a story I found the narrator/writer hard to care about and I can acknowledge that has a lot to do with my own culture. I thought the poetry of Mad King Sweeney was the best part of the work, but the characters themselves felt cardboard and not well developed and the plot never held my interest.

I struggled to make it through this relatively short novel because neither the plot nor characters were compelling to me. When the book was first published it had a few very positive reviews by famous authors but generally received cool reviews in publications and sold less than 240 copies before the unsold copies were incinerated during the bombing raids of England in 1940. This is a book that the readers who loved the work kept pushing it into republication and recommending it, but it also seems to be something that many readers fail to appreciate. I obviously am in the later group as a reader. I can appreciate the concept but as a story it fails for me.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. As I mentioned above, the character of the writer/narrator as a lazy individual who appears to do the minimum (although he achieves good test scores at the end) rubs hard against the Texas rugged individualism, Protestant work ethic, and persistent American optimism of a child of the 1970s. There is a vast cultural gap between the depressed economy of the 1930s and the lack of opportunity of that time and the time of my youth and I know that shapes a person. I appreciate that in At Swim Two Birds the author can probably use the narrator to be self-deprecating without lapsing completely into cynicism or nihilism.