H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e4 0it, though this ludicrous possibility cannot be entirely ruled out.
Why not just use the bar instead? It is much more likely that
Divney had adapted the bar some time earlier, but we would still
like to know why. Why didn’t the narrator knock the victim down
with his spade and then deal him a lethal blow with it, rather than
Divney striking him first and then the narrator? Could it be that
the implausible tale of the bicycle- pump is just a clumsy way of
deflecting guilt on to Divney, and that he actually took no part in
the crime? This possibility, at least, we can exclude, since when we
read further into the book we shall discover that Divney did indeed
wield his bicycle- pump to lay Mathers low. (When he does so,
incidentally, the narrator overhears the old man ‘say something
softly in a conversational tone’ as he collapses to the ground, words
which sound rather like ‘I do not care for celery’ or ‘I left my glasses
in the scullery’.)
The opening of The Third Policeman is gripping enough, but it
would be hard to imagine a more eye- catching first sentence than
that of Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers: ‘It was the after-
noon of my eighty- first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite
when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ (A
catamite is a man’s boy lover.) In the span of a single sentence, the
novel sets a deliciously scandalous scene: an eighty- one- year- old
man in bed with a boy, yet a man distinguished and respectable
enough to have a servant (we assume this is what Ali is), and to be
worthy of a visit from an archbishop. He is also cultivated enough
to use the word ‘catamite’, which is not often to be heard on Fox
TV. The fact that he seems unembarrassed by his situation might
suggest a certain English sangfroid. One of the achievements of the
sentence is the off- hand, economical way it supplies the reader in
one fell swoop with all this information, without the slightest sense