Dalkey Archive

By: Flann O'Brien

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Paperback | 11 May 1993

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Hailed as "the best comic fantasy since Tristram Shandy" upon its publication in 1964, The Dalkey Archive is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The book is not meant to be a novel or anything of the kind but a study in derision, various writers with their styles, and sundry modes, attitudes and cults being the rats in the cage."

Among the targets of O'Brien's derision are religiosity, intellectual abstractions, J. W. Dunne's and Albert Einstein's views on time and relativity, and the lives and works of Saint Augustine and James Joyce, both of whom have speaking parts in the novel. Bewildering? Yes, but as O'Brien insists, "a measure of bewilderment is part of the job of literature."

Set in the late 1940s in the village of Dalkey (some twelve miles south of Dublin), The Dalkey Archive also includes in its cast the mad scientist De Selby (featured in O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman), the magniloquent Sergeant Fottrell (whose "molly-cule theory" holds that a man can turn into a bicycle), and the local da Vinci, a looderamawn named Teague McGettigan. Doing his damnedest to find order in this metaphysical chaos is Mick Shaughnessy, who-with the aid of strong drink, his friend Hackett, and Mary, the young woman for whom they both compete-undergoes a crisis of faith both sublime and ridiculous.

Industry Reviews

The Dalkey Archive is witty, sly, outrageous, and the characters remind one at times of Nabokov or De Vries.
Dalkey Archive [Press] has made one reader very happy and likely will intoxicate many others with Flann O'Brien's fine brew of malt, salt, air, heady ideas and rich, ripe prose.
The undoubted humor of [The Dalkey Archive] derives as much from Mr. O'Brien's facile use of language as from the play of his fertile imagination . . . not to be missed.
It is increasingly clear that O'Brien is Ireland's finest novelist after Joyce.
Flann O'Brien is unquestionably a major author. His work, like that of Joyce, is so layered as to be almost Dante-esque . . . Joyce and Flann O'Brien assault your brain with words, style, magic, madness, and unlimited invention. --Anthony Burgess
The Dalkey Archiv

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