Offaly diabolical – An Irishman’s Diary about Flann O’Brien’s vision of hell

It’s not every weekend you get the chance to go through hell, or at least a version of it. So finding myself in Tullamore on Saturday last, I took a slight detour to a place called Cappincur. And there I spent some time exploring the infernal regions, in one of their literary representations, which proved a surprisingly pleasant experience.

For those of you not au fait with Flann O'Brien, I should explain that Cappincur was one of the more important childhood homes of his real-life creator Brian O'Nolan, who spent formative years there from the age of nine.

They were formative years in the life of Ireland too, starting in 1920, when the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries patrolled the area, and ending in 1922 when O'Nolan's father was transferred to the city, to become part of the new Free State's excise operation.

Impression

But in the meantime, the flat countryside around Tullamore left a deep impression on the future writer’s mind. And when, 20 years later, he wrote an existentialist murder mystery called

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The Third Policemen

, set mainly in a nether afterworld, he used Offaly as his model.

Or so at least says his biographer, Anthony Cronin, who suggests that the area's very flatness and lack of relief gave the novel the "curiously threatening and disturbing quality" it needed.

That the scenery was also highly flammable (thanks to the many turf bogs) must have been a factor too. But then again, there is nothing as obvious as fire in The Third Policeman's hell. On the contrary, the book's events take place in a strange but handsome countryside where "everything seemed almost too pleasant, too perfect, too finely made".

The narrator’s first journey, post-damnation, is along a road that he surmises must be one of the world’s oldest. His reasoning, like much of the book, is eccentric. But interestingly, it so happens that not far from Cappincur – near Edenderry – archaeologists once found a bog track dating from 2,000BC.

Even so, it would probably be a mistake to read much into such details, because the presiding genius in The Third Policeman is the lunatic scientist/philosopher De Selby, to the study of whose work the narrator is homicidally devoted.

Thus O’Brien uses the route’s supposed antiquity only as an excuse to digress into the savant’s theories about roads, which include his belief that a good one will always be essentially one-way – “with a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there”.

In De Selby’s opinion, it is asking for trouble to go east on a westerly road, or vice versa. But all I can say is I travelled both directions through the Bog of Allen at the weekend.  And apart from a slight narcoleptic effect – you might expect that in an area with Tullamore on one side and Lullymore on the other – there were no problems.

As for things demonic, the only one I noticed in Offaly was the continuing success of the devil’s buttermilk, specifically whiskey. This was what brought O’Nolan’s father there. And after a lapse of 60 years during which Tullamore stopped making the stuff – part of the century-long decline of Irish distilling – the town is now leading the latter-day liquid-gold rush, with a huge new plant opened in 2014.

Whiskey was something with which the adult Brian O’Nolan became all-too-well acquainted. But back in Tullamore, circa 1920, his relationship with alcohol was still entirely innocent. So, it seems, was his life in general.

Aged 11 by the time he left, he had still never been to school – learning everything he knew from books and, through Irish, from his parents. According to Cronin, his first recorded utterance in English was at their Cappincur home – a mini-mansion called the Copper Beeches – when his father berated him for loudly mimicking the accents of locals conversing on the road outside.

‘Mischief’

To this the scamp replied, in the book-learned language of English public schools: “And as for you, sir, if you do not conduct yourself I will do you a mischief.”

For all its hellish associations, Tullamore must have been an Edenic existence for a 10-year-old boy. And it must have seemed a paradise lost when he arrived Dublin.  Among the new experiences awaiting him there was the start of formal schooling in what, 30-odd years later, he would recall as the “diabolical academy” of Synge Street CBS.