Beating Time:
Flann O’Brien in Wonderland

Thursday 1 April 2021 7pm GMT

Praised by James Joyce as a “real writer” who had “the true comic spirit”, Flann O’Brien remains for many one of the best kept secrets of 20th-century Irish literature. In this talk, Dr Paul Fagan sheds light on O’Brien’s writing about Lewis Carroll, and discusses the influence of the Alice books on O’Brien’s absurd comic masterpiece The Third Policeman (1940). Indeed, the uncanny Parish of O’Brien’s novel exhibits its own brand of ‘Carrollian logic’.