Customer Reviews
At your own risk - By: Ford Ka, 21 Sep 2008 
The Dalkey Archive is a risky read - you risk never reaching for anything that O'Brien wrote again. He did not write that much but still it would be a pity to miss out At Swim-Two-Birds or The Third Policeman. Archive is a spin-off of the latter novel. Coherent, funny at places but it is more of sustained effort than tour-de-force which you have all the rights to expect from O'Brien.
There is little of plot here - two young Irish gentlemen meet by chance a mad scientist & having learned about his plan to annihilate humanity try to stop him from doing so. Characters as different as St Augustine & James Joyce make cameo appearances but they add little to the slim plot. The sad facts of the case are that O'Brien failed to make the expected splash with his first novel, his second wasn't even published & he went on making a brilliant career as a satirical columnist. When twenty years later At Swim-Two-Birds was resurrected & hailed as the first post-modern novel, he tried to go back to writing fiction but with little artistic success. And yet this is a classic so why not give it a chance?
Painfully bad - By: lexo1941, 23 Dec 2007 
Before I explain the one star, let me just point out that I think that Flann O'Brien wrote two truly wonderful novels - The Third Policeman & An Béal Bocht (superbly translated by Patrick Power as The Poor Mouth),in which his bizarre & haunted genius dovetailed beautifully with his sense of fun & absurdity.
He also wrote one smart-alec student effort, otherwise known as A Swim-Two-Birds, & two really dire potboilers, The Hard Life & The Dalkey Archive. He wasin the middle of an even worse novel when he died. What was wrong with him can be chalked up to drink, disappointment & failure of nerve. When The Third Policeman was rejected by its publishers, he chucked the manuscript into a desk drawer & eventually rewrote the least good bits of it into this futile & dismally unfunny tale of two students getting mixed upin a self-consciously wacky scientific experiment. James Joyce is a character, but not a convincing or effective one. The humour is laboured & the prose style is a sad falling-off from the quicksilver beauty & precision of The Third Policeman (which, to be fair, had been written twenty years & many, many drinks earlier).
Only Flann fans could get anything out of The Dalkey Archive. The rest of us should quietly ignore it & revelin his best work. The Hard Life is, if anything, even worse, marked as it is by all this book's failures of style, courage & imagination whilst also being tainted by vile misogyny.
Flann does it again - By: , 19 Feb 2002 
The Dalkey Archives is essentially a portrait of the insane philosopher/mad professor De Selby, so often referred toin the extended footnotes of O' Brien's opus The Third Policeman.
The book's more satirical elements never impinge on the laughs to be had from the farcical expolits of De Selbyin his twisted plot to deprive the work of oxygen.
Read The Third Policeman & then this. You will be extremely pleased.
A POST-MODERN CLASSIC - By: kevin@kkilsby.freeserve.co.uk, 04 Oct 1999 
This text draws heavily on, no reproduces parts of O 'Brien's unparalled " The Third Policeman".
A comic tour-de-force,this book attacks his familiar targets of the Gaelic revival, Modernism (James Joyce) & the Irish State: & at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so. Not a patch on the "Third Policeman" but then nothing else is?
