At Swim-Two-Birds
Based on Wikipedia: At Swim-Two-Birds
A Novel That Devours Itself
Imagine a book where the characters get so fed up with their author that they drug him, put him on trial, and torture him nearly to death. Now imagine that this revenge plot is being written by the author's own illegitimate son—a character who was born fully grown, polite, and gifted with the ability to write fiction. Welcome to the delirious world of At Swim-Two-Birds.
Published in 1939 by an Irish writer named Brian O'Nolan under the pen name Flann O'Brien, this novel is widely considered one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction ever written. Metafiction, for the uninitiated, is fiction that knows it's fiction—stories that pull back the curtain and show you the machinery of storytelling itself. But O'Brien doesn't just pull back one curtain. He pulls back curtain after curtain after curtain, until you're not sure which story you're in or who's writing whom.
The book's strange title comes from an ancient Irish place name: Snám dá Én, meaning "the narrow water of the two birds." It refers to a ford on the River Shannon that was supposedly visited by the legendary Mad King Sweeney, who wanders through these pages reciting poetry about trees and birds and his own miserable exile.
Three Beginnings (Or Is It Four?)
The unnamed narrator of At Swim-Two-Birds is a Dublin university student who has a theory about novels. "One beginning and one ending for a book," he declares, "was a thing I did not agree with." So he sets three separate stories in motion.
The first involves a creature called the Pooka MacPhellimey, described as "a member of the devil class." The second follows a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character invented by yet another character—a cynical writer of Westerns named Dermot Trellis. The third strand weaves together Irish legends about the warrior Finn Mac Cool and the aforementioned Mad King Sweeney.
But wait. The student himself points out that there's actually a fourth beginning: his own discourse on the benefits of having three beginnings. The novel is already eating its own tail before you've finished the opening pages.
The Student and His Uncle
In what might generously be called the "real world" of the novel, our narrator lives with his uncle, a clerk at the Guinness Brewery who suspects—correctly—that his nephew does very little actual studying. The student spends most of his time drinking stout with friends, lying in bed, and working on his elaborate literary creation. His uncle is a complacent bachelor, self-consciously respectable, and represents everything solid and conventional that the novel proceeds to undermine.
This frame story grounds the wild metafictional games in something recognizable: the eternal tension between a young person's artistic ambitions and an older generation's practical concerns. It's a story as old as literature itself, which is fitting for a book that contains references to fourteen different sources in early and medieval Irish literature.
When Characters Revolt
Here's where things get truly strange. The stories the student is writing begin to bleed into one another. John Furriskey, the character created by Dermot Trellis, meets and befriends two other Trellis creations named Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan. These fictional characters become aware of their fictional status—and they don't like it one bit.
Who would? Imagine discovering that your entire existence is at the mercy of some hack writer of pulp Westerns, that your every action and emotion is being manipulated for someone else's cheap entertainment. The characters decide to fight back. They manage to drug Trellis so that he spends more time asleep, giving them the freedom to lead quiet domestic lives instead of being jerked around by his lurid plots.
But Trellis, even in his diminished state, can't resist creating more trouble. He conjures up a beautiful woman named Sheila Lamont specifically so that Furriskey can seduce and betray her. Instead, Trellis himself becomes "blinded by her beauty" and assaults her. The result of this transgression is Orlick—a son who is born fully grown, articulate, and possessing a remarkable gift for fiction.
The stage is now set for the ultimate revenge.
The Trial of the Author
All of Trellis's characters eventually gather at a place called the Red Swan Hotel. The guest list is extraordinary: there's Furriskey and his friends, of course, but also Finn Mac Cool from ancient Irish legend, the mad poet King Sweeney, the urbane devil-creature Pooka, and—perhaps most wonderfully—an invisible and quarrelsome Good Fairy who lives in the Pooka's pocket.
Together, they devise a plan. Orlick, the gifted writer, will compose a novel about his own father. In this nested fiction, Trellis is put on trial by his creations, found guilty, and subjected to vicious torture.
The torture scenes are grotesque and absurd. Trellis is dragged through briars, forced to drink filthy water, and subjected to humiliations that blur the line between slapstick and genuine cruelty. It's revenge fantasy taken to its logical extreme—what happens when the puppets seize control of the strings.
A Very Irish Ending
Just as Orlick's novel is about to climax with Trellis's death, something unexpected happens in the "real" world. The student narrator passes his university exams and reconciles with his uncle. Perhaps feeling generous, or perhaps just ready to end his elaborate game, the student wraps up his story by having Trellis's maid accidentally burn the papers that sustain the existence of Furriskey and his friends. With the manuscript destroyed, Trellis is freed from his tormentors.
It's an ending that's simultaneously satisfying and deeply ironic. The student's success in the conventional world—passing exams, making peace with family—enables him to release his characters from their elaborate rebellion. Bourgeois normality triumphs, but only because the artist chooses to let it.
The Man Behind the Typewriter
Brian O'Nolan composed this intricate novel on an Underwood portable typewriter in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother. The typewriter sat on a table O'Nolan had built himself from the offcuts of a modified trellis that had stood in the family's back garden. His biographer believes this unusual writing surface inspired the name of the character Dermot Trellis—a delightful detail that blurs yet another boundary between fiction and reality.
O'Nolan grew up in an Irish-speaking household and studied medieval Irish literature at university, though he later claimed he'd attended few of his lectures. His master's thesis was on nature poetry in Irish, and he'd acquired enough Old Irish to compose in the language with reasonable fluency. This deep familiarity with Irish literary tradition permeates At Swim-Two-Birds. Most of the poetry recited by King Sweeney comes directly from a Middle Irish romance called Buile Suibhne, though O'Nolan modified the translations for comic effect. Where the original text refers to "the bell of saints before saints," O'Nolan renders it as "the saint-bell of saints with sainty-saints."
The novel also incorporates various "found texts." A letter from a horse-racing tipster was given to O'Nolan by a college friend. A painter named Cecil Salkeld contributed something called the "Conspectus of the Arts and Sciences." Before submission, O'Nolan shared the manuscript with friends, one of whom wrote back with suggestions for ending the novel. O'Nolan incorporated part of this letter directly into the text.
The sudden death of O'Nolan's father in 1937 may have influenced one of the novel's quieter moments: the episode where the student narrator regrets his unkind thoughts about his previously despised uncle.
A Book That Almost Didn't Survive
At Swim-Two-Birds was accepted for publication by Longman's on the recommendation of Graham Greene, who was working as a reader for them at the time. Greene's report was enthusiastic: "It is in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses: its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland."
The book was published on March 13, 1939, under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. O'Nolan had suggested this pen name because "it contains an unusual name and one that is quite ordinary." He'd already used it to write hoax letters to the Irish Times.
The timing could hardly have been worse. By the outbreak of World War Two, the novel had sold barely more than 240 copies. Then, in 1940, Longman's London premises were destroyed during a Luftwaffe bombing raid. Almost all the unsold copies went up in flames.
The book was republished in New York in 1950, but sales remained low. It wasn't until 1959 that a London publisher named Timothy O'Keeffe persuaded O'Nolan to allow a new edition. By then, the novel had acquired an underground reputation. It would eventually be recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century fiction.
A Divided Reception
The initial reviews were not kind. The Times Literary Supplement dismissed the book's only notable feature as "a schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity." The New Statesman complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull." The Irish novelist Seán Ó Faoláin remarked that while the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it."
But writers saw something the reviewers missed. Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would appear on dust jackets for decades, declared: "This is just the book to give your sister—if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl." Anthony Burgess later named it one of the ninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984.
Most significantly, James Joyce himself read the book. O'Nolan's friend gave Joyce an inscribed copy, and Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit." He tried to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, though without success. At Swim-Two-Birds is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read.
Borges and the Verbal Labyrinth
In 1939, the same year the novel was published, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay describing it as one of the most complex "verbal labyrinths" he had ever encountered. Borges, himself a master of literary games and nested narratives, recognized a kindred spirit.
He summarized the book's structure with evident delight: a Dublin student writes a novel about a pub owner, who writes a novel about his customers (including the student), who in turn write novels featuring the pub owner and the student along with other writers writing about other novelists. "The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons," Borges noted, "copiously annotated by the student."
Borges concluded by quoting Schopenhauer: "Dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness."
Characters Against Their Creators
O'Brien wasn't the first writer to explore the idea of fictional characters rebelling against their author. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno had done something similar in his 1914 novel Niebla. Even earlier, W.S. Gilbert—before his famous collaboration with Arthur Sullivan—wrote a comic musical called A Sensation Novel in 1871, about an author whose characters are dissatisfied with their treatment.
O'Nolan himself had explored this territory before At Swim-Two-Birds. In 1934, he published a short story called "Scenes in a Novel" in a university literary magazine. The narrator, a novelist called Brother Barnabas, describes how his characters have grown tired of doing his bidding and are conspiring to murder him. "The book is seething with conspiracy," Brother Barnabas reports with mounting alarm, "and there have been at least two whispered consultations between all the characters, including two who have not yet been officially created."
But At Swim-Two-Birds takes this premise further than anyone had before. The rebellion isn't just a metaphor or a clever conceit—it's the engine that drives the entire novel.
The Menippean Tradition
Literary scholars have classified At Swim-Two-Birds as a Menippean satire, a form that dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Menippus of Gadara. Menippean satire is characterized by its mixture of prose and verse, its encyclopedic range of reference, its playful attitude toward intellectual systems, and its willingness to throw together wildly disparate materials.
O'Nolan encountered this tradition through multiple channels. He admired modern writers like James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, and the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, all of whom drew on Menippean techniques. But he may also have encountered it through his studies of medieval Irish literature. The Middle Irish satire Aislinge Meic Con Glinne—"The Vision of Mac Conglinne"—has been described as the greatest work of parody in the Irish language.
This lineage helps explain why At Swim-Two-Birds can contain Irish mythology, cowboy Westerns, devil creatures, Good Fairies, and college drinking buddies without ever feeling like it's falling apart. The Menippean tradition gives it license to be everything at once.
A Postcolonial Reading
In 2000, the scholar Declan Kiberd analyzed At Swim-Two-Birds from a postcolonial perspective. He saw the novel as a complex response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland—a country that had won political independence but was struggling to define what that independence meant culturally.
Kiberd argued that the fragmented, many-voiced texture of the book reflects an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." In a colonized or recently decolonized society, questions of identity and authenticity become fraught. Who has the authority to tell the Irish story? What traditions should be preserved, and which discarded?
Interestingly, Kiberd notes that one element of the book is never seriously mocked or undermined: Sweeney's poetry. The mad king's verses about trees and birds and exile retain their beauty even amid all the parody. This, Kiberd suggests, reflects O'Nolan's genuine respect for Irish-language literature—a respect that kept him from lapsing into pure nihilism.
Ahead of Its Time
The academic Keith Hopper has argued that despite its reputation as O'Brien's masterpiece, At Swim-Two-Birds is actually less experimental than his second novel, The Third Policeman. That book, which features bicycles that merge with their riders and a police station that exists in a dimensional pocket, wasn't published until after O'Brien's death in 1966.
Hopper suggests that At Swim-Two-Birds is best understood as a "late-modernist, transitional text"—a bridge between the experiments of Joyce and the postmodern fiction that would emerge in the following decades. Writers like B.S. Johnson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Alasdair Gray, and John Fowles have all acknowledged its influence, sometimes with explicit references in their own work.
The French novelist Raymond Queneau, a founding member of the experimental writing group Oulipo, has been compared to O'Brien for their shared love of literary games and constraints. Both writers understood that rules and structures don't limit creativity—they enable it.
The Last Word
At Swim-Two-Birds was eventually recognized as a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In 2011, Time magazine placed it on their list of the top 100 fiction books written in English since 1923. The Guardian included it in their list of the 100 best English-language novels ever written.
The Irish critic Vivian Mercier called it "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century—with the doubtful exception of Finnegans Wake." Anthony Cronin, who encountered the book as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, remembered its "unmistakable sheen of the avant-garde" and "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech."
But perhaps the most fitting tribute came from Kiberd: "He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries."
O'Brien gave us a novel where characters drug their author, where the past and present of Irish literature collide in a Dublin pub, where a Good Fairy argues from someone's pocket. He showed us that the boundaries between author and character, between reality and fiction, between high culture and low, are far more porous than we usually admit.
And he did it all on a table made from a garden trellis.