The initial reviews for
At Swim-Two-Birds were not enthusiastic.
The Times Literary Supplement said that the book's only notable feature was a "schoolboy brand of mild vulgarity"; the
New Statesman complained that "long passages in imitation of the Joycean parody of the early Irish epic are devastatingly dull" and the Irish novelist
Seán Ó Faoláin commented in ''
John O'London's Weekly'' that although the book had its moments, it "had a general odour of spilt Joyce all over it." However, most of the support for
At Swim-Two-Birds came not from newspaper reviewers but from writers.
Dylan Thomas, in a remark that would be quoted on dust-jackets in later editions of the book, said "This is just the book to give your sister – if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl".
Anthony Burgess considered it one of the
ninety-nine greatest novels written between 1939 and 1984. Graham Greene's enthusiastic reader's report was instrumental in getting the book published in the first place:It is in the line of
Tristram Shandy and
Ulysses: its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland. ... We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Nolan takes
Pirandello and
Gide a long way further. O'Nolan's friend
Niall Sheridan gave
James Joyce an inscribed copy of the book. Joyce declared it the work of a "real writer" who had "the true comic spirit" and attempted to get the book reviewed in French periodicals, although without success. It is thought to have been the last novel Joyce ever read.
Anthony Cronin has written of the effect the novel had on him as a seventeen-year-old in 1940s Dublin, praising its "umistakable sheen of the
avant-garde", describing it "breathtakingly funny" and noting "the deadly accuracy of the ear for lower middle class Dublin speech". Most academic criticism of the book has sought to appropriate it one way or the other; critics like
Bernard Benstock, who argued that O'Brien's embrace of myth and refusal of realism "ensnare[d] him with the second rank", have been in the minority.
Vivian Mercier described it in
The Irish Comic Tradition as "the most fantastic novel written by an Irishman in the twentieth century – with the doubtful exception of
Finnegans Wake." Rüdiger Imhof has noted how works by
B. S. Johnson,
Gilbert Sorrentino,
Alasdair Gray and
John Fowles carry explicit references to
At Swim-Two-Birds.
Michael Cronin draws attention to the
metafictional and game-playing elements of the book, comparing it to the fictions of
Raymond Queneau, and responds to criticism that the book is insufficiently respectful of realist conventions:Contrary to what Benstock argues, what post-independence Ireland needed was not less but more of the type of playful, self-aware writing being proposed by Flann O'Brien in
At Swim-Two-Birds. ... We would all be very much poorer without Mad O'Brien's narrative chessmen.Keith Hopper has argued that, contrary to the common tendency to favour
At Swim-Two-Birds as "the primary defining text of the O'Brien oeuvre", the novel is in fact less, not more, experimental than O'Brien's second novel, the posthumously published
The Third Policeman:
At Swim-Two-Birds is best considered as a late-modernist, transitional text which critiques both realism and modernism in an openly deconstructive manner, and in the process comes to the brink of an exciting new aesthetic. I will argue that the metafictional techniques developed publicly in [the book] ... are imbricated and embedded within the texture of
The Third Policeman. In a long essay published in 2000,
Declan Kiberd analysed
At Swim-Two-Birds from a
postcolonial perspective, seeing it as a complex imaginative response to the economic and social stagnation of 1930s Ireland and arguing that the fragmented and polyphonic texture of the book is the work of an author who is "less anxious to say something new than to find a self that is capable of saying anything at all." Kiberd suggests that the one element of the book which is not seriously ironised or satirised is Sweeney's poetry, and that this is related to O'Nolan's genuine if complex respect for Irish-language literature:What saved O'Brien from lapsing into postmodern nihilism was not his Catholicism which held that the world was a doomed and hopeless place, but his respect for the prose of
An tOileánach or the poetry of
Buile Suibhne, where language still did its appointed work. ... He was an experimentalist who was way ahead of his time: only after his death did his readers learn how to become his contemporaries. In a 1939 essay titled
When Fiction Lives in Fiction,
Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges described Flann O'Brien's masterpiece as follows, I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O'Brien,
At Swim-Two-Birds. A student in
Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student.
At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in
prose and
verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary
Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book.
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, is to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness. In 2011, the book was placed on
Time magazine's top 100
fiction books written in English since 1923. ==Translations==