In lieu of a proper book review, I’ll just give you some quotes from the book The Third Policeman. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from a book written in 1939 and set in rural Ireland. It’s just a little fantastical, and I can now understand why it wasn’t published until 1967. As one reviewer said – you’ll never look at bicycles the same way again.
“Tell me,” he continued, “would it be true that you are an itinerant dentist and that you came on a tricycle?”
“It would not,” I replied.
“On a patent tandem?”
“No.”
“Dentists are an unpredictable coterie of people,” he said. “Do you tell me it was a velocipede or a penny-farthing?”
***
“Why should anyone steal a watch when they can steal a bicycle?”
***
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.”
***
“…You do not mean to say that these bicycles eat food?”
“They were never seen doing it, nobody ever caught them with a mouthful of steak. All I know is that the food disappears.”
