Description
James Joyce turns up alive and well, serving drinks in an Irish pub and claiming that Ulysses was only a practical joke. St.Augustine is interrogated in an underwater cave where he announces: “I was a man that was very easily sunburnt.” Though a mad scientist named De Selby is bent on destroying the human rac, Mick and Hackett- the only men who can save us- are too preoccupied with the lovely Mary to concentrate on foiling him. Deriding and skewering everyone- scientists, philosophers, writers, drunkards, and priests, to name only a few- who think they have the answers, and proving once again that “a measure of bewilderment is part of the job of literature,” Flann O’Brien’s last novel is both sublime and ridiculous, a story of metaphysical chaos that’s been hailed as “the best comic fantasy since Tristam Shandy”.