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Is It About A Bicycle?

Yes it is. At least part of it is. A percentage, certainly. I’ve just come back from the Cathedral Quarter’s Out to Lunch Festival at the Black Box in Belfast where Stephen Rea, with musical backing led by Neil Martin and Colin Reid, was reading from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. There may be better ways to spend a cold lunchtime in Belfast in January, but if there are, I (having led a sheltered life) haven’t encountered them. The venue was packed to capacity. The accompanying music was beautifully atmospheric: at turns dark and brooding, comic and upbeat and Rea’s reading was totally captivating. It’s years since I’ve read the original book, but it’s as funny and as disturbing hearing it today as it was meeting it all those years ago as a student. It must have been quite a task to abridge the story but it’s been effectively and efficiently done. Looking over the text again, there is so much to it. O’Brien’s unnamed protagonist, a self-confessed murderer, finds himself embroiled in the events of the strange world of the third policeman, he who is never seen or heard tell of, who is 'always on his beat and never off it’ and who ‘signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep’. The laughs today came largely from Rea’s reading of Sergeant Pluck’s ‘Atomic Theory’ on the dangerous exchange of atoms between bicycle and rider and the perils of spending too much time in the saddle: ‘You would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles,’ claims the Sergeant, ‘[…]the man-charged bicycle is a phenomenon of great charm and intensity and a very dangerous article.’ The Sergeant is engaged in stealing and hiding bicycles in order to control these worrying tendencies, the absurdity being that as Sergeant, he is also required to help retrieve the stolen bicycles. There’s no denying the Beckettian echoes of a nightmarish world that ultimately turns on itself. If you haven’t read any Flann O’Brien, if you have a penchant for the dark and the comic and the absurd, I’d thoroughly recommend him. And if you get the chance to be in a room with Stephen Rea’s voice, I’d urge you to do that as well. If the opportunity arises to combine the two, well that would be just dandy. I feel very privileged to have been there today. I’d go again in the blink of an eye. If I had a bicycle.