The Dalkey Archive
From the author of the classic novel ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds’ comes this ingenious tale which follows the mad and absurd ambitions of a scientist determined to destroy the world.Flann O'Brien's third novel, 'The Dalkey Archive' is a riotous depiction of the extraordinary events surrounding theologian and mad scientist De Selby's attempt to destroy the world by removing all the oxygen from the atmosphere. Only Michael Shaughnessy, 'a lowly civil servant', and James Joyce, alive and well and working as a barman in the nearby seaside resort of Skerries, can stop the inimitable De Selby in his tracks.
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FLANN OâBRIEN
The Dalkey Archive
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007
Previously published in paperback by Grafton in 1986 (reprinted once), Paladin 1990 and as a Flamingo Modern Classic in 1993 (reprinted 10 times)
First published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd 1964
Copyright © Brian OâNolan 1964
PS Section copyright © Richard Shephard 2007
PS⢠is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007247196
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN 9780007405893 Version: 2016-03-31
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I dedicate these pages to my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that Iâm only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home.
Contents
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features â¦
The Dalkey Archive: Not So Much an Encore as a Rehearsal
Joyce: Portraits of the Artist as a Fictional Character
Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction. And it is â vestibule of a heavenly conspection.
Behold it. Ascend a shaded, dull, lane-like way, per iter, as it were, tenebricosum, and see it burst upon you as if a curtain had been miraculously whisked away. Yes, the Vico Road.
Good Lord!
The road itself curves gently upward and over a low wall to the left by the footpath enchantment is spread â rocky grassland falling fast away to reach a toy-like railway far below, with beyond it the immeasurable immanent sea, quietly moving slowly in the immense expanse of Killiney Bay. High in the sky which joins it at a seam far from precise, a caravan of light cloud labours silently to the east.
And to the right? Monstrous arrogance: a mighty shoulder of granite climbing ever away, its overcoat of furze and bracken embedded with stern ranks of pine, spruce, fir and horse-chestnut, with further on fine clusters of slim, meticulous eucalyptus â the whole a dazzle of mildly moving leaves, a farrago of light, colour, haze and copious air, a wonder that is quite vert, verdant, vertical, verticillate, vertiginous, in the shade of branches even vespertine. Heavens, has something escaped from the lexicon of Sergeant Fottrell?
But why this name Vico Road? Is there to be recalled in this magnificence a certain philosopherâs pattern of manâs lot on earth â thesis, antithesis, synthesis, chaos? Hardly. And is this to be compared with the Bay of Naples? That is not to be thought of, for in Naples there must be heat and hardness belabouring desiccated Italians â no soft Irish skies, no little breezes that feel almost coloured.
At a great distance ahead and up, one could see a remote little obelisk surmounting some steps where one can sit and contemplate all this scene: the sea, the peninsula of Howth across the bay and distantly, to the right, the dim outline of the Wicklow mountains, blue or grey. Was the monument erected to honour the Creator of all this splendour? No. Perhaps in remembrance of a fine Irish person He once made â Johannes Scotus Erigena, perhaps, or possibly Parnell? No indeed: Queen Victoria.
Mary was nudging Michael Shaughnessy. She loitered enticingly about the fringes of his mind; the deep brown eyes, the light hair, the gentleness yet the poise. She was really a nuisance yet never far away. He frowned and closed his fist, but intermittent muttering immediately behind him betokened that Hackett was there.
â How is she getting on, he asked, drawing level, that pious Mary of yours?
