Master of letters

It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence of James Joyce, struggling to have their first novels published in the late 1930s. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man in the grip of profound indolence, was published in 1938; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, whose central character is an extremely idiosyncratic young man etc., in 1939. Murphy is great fun, but its author went on to purify and yet somehow at the same time enrich his prose style, and would win the Nobel; At Swim-Two-Birds (and its successor, The Third Policeman, written immediately afterwards, but never published in its author’s lifetime) is considered by many to be the high point of O’Brien’s output, and its author died, basically of drink (and inept medical treatment), in 1966, 23 years before Beckett, who was five years his senior.