2In “Environments”, Nicholas Allen dives into O’Nolan’s fascination with water as both metaphor and material, arguing that in his “water-powered prose” (p. 40), “everything leaks into everything else” (p. 32, my emphasis). He depicts O’Nolan’s imagination as a “kind of engineered oddity” (p. 38) or a “submerged” collage of incongruous parts – closer to “liquid postmodernism” than “liquid modernism” – exploring the “shifting hydroscapes of […] Ireland” (p. 25). Julie Bates reads The Third Policeman atmospherically: air becomes a figure for mortality, corporeality, and wartime biopolitics, anticipating post-Covid-19 pandemic anxieties. Elliott Mills’s essay on paper in At Swim-Two-Birds situates the 1937 Constitution as backdrop, showing how paper “builds and destroys worlds” (p. 68), and exposes and deconstructs the “confined systems of thought” (p. 72) that structure textual authority. Jonathan Foster interprets roads in The Third Policeman as infrastructures of law, colonial tyranny and environmental inertia, re-reading the novel “as an allegory of climate change” (p. 86). Christin M. Mulligan closes this section by exploring transgenerational trauma, offering a Deleuzian analysis of “becoming imperceptible” (p. 104), linking cultural decline and linguistic loss to animalised tropes of “becoming seal” (p. 96) or “becoming pig” (p. 101).

4The final section, “Machines”, explores O’Brien’s mechanical imagination. James Fraser revisits the iconic bicycle motif in The Third Policeman, reading Sergeant Pluck’s “Atomic Theory” of hybrid half-humanised bikes as a satire on Ireland’s industrial failures and “the absurd contortions of nationalised consumer philanthropy” (p. 198), which recycles (no bad pun intended) Arthur Griffith’s category of spurious Irishness. Holly Connell Schaaf applies disability studies to the same novel, arguing that the one-legged narrator internalises “ableism”, whose cyclical entrapment simultaneously reveals and resists “ableist norms” (p. 200). James Bacon analyses O’Brien’s Irish Times columns on “steam men” (p. 216), combining archival photographs (p. 217-218) with an incisive critique of mechanisation, linguistic politics, and militarism – one could have thrown in “national identity politics” to complete the triad. Starting her essay by quoting from Flore Coulouma’s seminal work on linguistics (p. 235), Yuta Imazeki’s essay on “radio jamming” in At Swim-Two-Birds traces how narrative noise and interference become generative, through the fragmenting dominant discourses, so as to open new orders of meaning. Finally, Ruth Alison Clemens compares The Third Policeman and Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story (1991), exploring spectrality and the porous borders between life and death, where narrative becomes a “plane of immanence” (p. 267).

5The book excels in combining ecological materialism and cultural critique without falling into historicist or anachronistic traps. It convincingly shows how O’Nolan’s nonhuman visions resonate with timeless universal crises – colonialism, famine, war, infrastructural violence. It also sustains theoretical range (Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Michel Serres, Timothy Morton, Natasha Saltes, etc.) without sacrificing textual precision. Each essay reinterprets O’Brien’s major works through nonhuman perspectives that refresh and deepen his legacy and relevance.

6Interdisciplinarity is the book’s greatest strength: contributions from media, sound, disability, and animal studies collectively expand the field’s scope. Some readers may desire clearer cross-references or prefatory framing to highlight innovating theoretical alignments; yet this fragmentation mirrors O’Brien’s own iconoclastic poetics.

7In sum, Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman is a landmark in O’Brien scholarship and the broader nonhuman turn. It decentres anthropocentric readings and repositions O’Brien as a (post)modernist, whose visions of the nonhuman remain urgently relevant to our contemporary ecological and philosophical crises.