Title: At Swim-Two-Birds
Author: Flann O’Brien
Year: 1939
Country: Ireland

Format: Paperback
Pages: 228
Read: 4 – 13 January 2026
First reading

At Swim-Two-Birds, the debut novel by Flann O’Brien, is actually three books within a book within a book. (Eat your heart out, Charlie Kaufman!) At the outermost layer it follows the beer-soaked, puke-stained exploits of its nameless narrator, an indolent student. The Student lives in Dublin with his uncle, whom he despises.

Description of my uncle: Red faced, bead eyed, ball bellied. Fleshy about the shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape-like effect to gait. Large moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.

The Student spends most of his time either drinking and bantering with friends, or lazing in his bedroom. But he’s also working on a book; a surreal work of modernist metafiction in which an author, Dermot Trellis, loses control of his characters. Trellis’s characters, plundered from disparate sources—Irish folklore, Western novels, Dublin pubs—spring to life spontaneously in his reality as he writes them. These characters start to disobey Trellis, living their own lives whenever he’s asleep. Eventually they conspire to rewrite Trellis’s manuscript, torturing him with his own creation.

I found this an extremely challenging read. Last year I enjoyed Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, itself a bizarre and disorienting book, but At Swim-Two-Birds is even weirder. Luckily I buddy-read it with my friend Mark, who was able to explain some of the more “aggressively Irish” aspects. I found the sections about the folk hero Finn MacCool especially hard-going, full of aggravating repetition and droning lists of made-up birds. Maybe it’s funnier if you were brought up with those folk tales, but for me it was a slog!

However I did appreciate the book for its surrealism, its bawdy humour, and the sheer inventiveness of the metafictional story. In places it struck me as an unlikely hybrid of Duck Amuck and James Joyce. (Or at least my impression of James Joyce, who I must admit I’ve yet to read. Dubliners is going straight on my wishlist after this.)

At Swim-Two-Birds is an enigmatic book; the meaning of the story doesn’t make itself immediately apparent. The different layers of fictional reality start to influence each other, gradually revealing some truths about the Student’s life… if you read between the lines. This is where buddy-reading really came into its own. Discussing the book with Mark helped us both get a handle on it, and our chats were sometimes more fun than the actual book—certainly the Finn MacCool bits!

In fact, we plan to have a video chat about our ‘Flannuary’ experience later this month on Mark’s YouTube channel. We hope to see you there, perhaps with pint in hand. A pint of plain is your only man!