Fintan O’Toole on Flann O’Brien
An excerpt from his fine article on the man, the myth, the legend . . . The banning of almost every serious Irish contemporary novel also created the strange literary culture in which O’Brien revelled, one in which officially approved reading was narrowed to theological reflections, Gaelic sagas and peasant narratives while the thirst for contemporary stories was slaked by imported cowboy stories and cheap crime thrillers. O’Brien’s main novels draw much of their humour from the absurd conjunctions…