BARRING reincarnation, I can't have been alive at the start of the Dark Ages. But even so, a sense of déjà vu from those days has been overpowering me of late. It must be folk memory, inherited from a 6th-century monk, writes Frank McNally

If you're similarly afflicted, you may recall that, back then, the entire future of Europe hung in the balance. Barbarians had overrun the continent, burning books and libraries and places of learning. The whole Western classical tradition faced oblivion. And suddenly, a hitherto obscure, mist-covered Atlantic island - whose very remoteness from the centres of power had protected it from the Goths and Vandals - found itself pivotal to Europe's fate.

The holy men of Ireland rose to the challenge, rescuing whatever old texts they could find, sacred and profane, and bringing them back to their cells and monasteries. There, they copied them painstakingly for the benefit of posterity. But they didn't just copy. They also embellished, illuminating the manuscripts with glorious colours, marginal notes, and even doodles for their own and other readers' amusement.

By the time the Vikings came rampaging, the monks had scattered across Europe again, re-evangelising the continent. The darkest hour had passed. The books were safe. And in the process, like that anonymous 9th-century scribe who wrote Pangur Bán, the monks had lain the foundations of modern literature: "I and Pangur Bán my cat,/ 'Tis a like task we are at Hunting mice is his delight,/ Hunting words I sit all night."

In a similarly playful mode, Thomas Cahill has told the story of the saints-and-scholars era in a book called How the Irish Saved Civilisation. Naturally, he exaggerated a bit: he had inherited a great story-telling tradition, after all. But his book represented a conscious attempt to celebrate his race and what was - in his words - its "one moment of unblemished glory".

Until 2008, that is: because, a whole millennium-and-a-half later, another such moment may just have presented itself. Once again, it seems, Europe's future lies in the balance. And once again, that misty island on its western periphery has been thrust centre stage.

Conditions have changed somewhat, of course. "Rome" has not fallen this time, exactly: it has merely been amended into oblivion by subsequent treaties, of which the latest is "Lisbon". The barbarians are not what they used to be, either. Rather than pillage Western Europe, traditional style, they applied politely for membership. But the EU is crumbling under the strain, even so. And again, it is only the Irish who can save it.

The good news, this time, is that we have only one text to transcribe. The bad news is: what a text! The Lisbon Treaty presents a broadly similar challenge to the lay reader as a Latin psalter must have done to that original Eurosceptic, Attila the Hun. And reacting to the document as Attila might have done would be entirely understandable.

Faced with its dense forest of verbiage - a forest that the No campaign claims is populated by hobgoblins and shape-shifting monsters - one may at least be prompted to paraphrase another mediaeval scribe, quoted by Cahill.

The scribe had preserved a Celtic saga for posterity, but felt the need to attach a health warning: "I who have copied down this story, or more accurately, fantasy, do not credit the details of the story or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies and some are poetical figments. Some seem possible and others not. Some are for the enjoyment of idiots." And yet our modern-day monks must not only make Lisbon intelligible to themselves and their electorate but - by extension - to the electorates of all member-states. For the rest of the EU has arranged, in its wisdom or cynicism, that the treaty need not be put to the ballot. In accepting or rejecting it, therefore, Irish voters will do so for all of Europe. The responsibility is awe-inspiring.

In such circumstances, I am ashamed to say

Hugh Laurie: : So lets talk instead about flexibility of language - erm, linguistic elasticity, if you'd like.

Stephen Fry:: Yes, i think that I've said earlier that our language, English -

L: As spoken by us.

F: As we speak it, yes, certainly-, defines us. We are defined by our language, if you will.

L (to screen): Hello. We're talking about language.

F: Perhaps I can illustrate my point. Let me at least try. Here is a question: (hun...)

L: What is it?

F: Oh! Hun...my question is this: is our language - English - capable... is English capable of sustaining demagoguery?

L: Demagoguery?

F: Demagoguery.

L: And by "demagoguery" you mean...

F: By "demagoguery" I mean demagoguery...

L: I thought so.

F: I mean highly charged oratory persuasive whipping-up rhetoric. Listen to me, listen to me. If Hitler had been British, would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged up, fired up by his inflammatory speeches or would we simply have laughed? Is English to ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles? Would his language simply have rung false in our ears?

L: We are talking about things ringing false in our ears.

F: May I compartmentalize - I hate to, but may I, may I: is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically - extrinsically - from the language itself? It's a chicken and egg problem.

L (to screen): We're talking about chickens, we're talking about eggs.

F: Hun...let me start to leverage here: There's language and there's speech. Now, there's chess and there's a game of chess. Mark the difference for me. Mark it please.

L (to screen): We've gone to chess.

F: Imagine a piano keyboard, eh, 88 keys, only 88 and yet, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed by hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, trillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers. Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother.

L (to screen): ...

F: And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: I love you, don't go in there, get out, you have no right to say that, stop it, why should I, that hurt, help, Marjorie is dead. Hmn?. Surely, it's a thought to take out for cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

L: So, to you language is more than just means of communication?

F: Oh, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my check-out girl... language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from a old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoires. Language is the creak on a stair, it's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, it's the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

L (to screen): Night, night.

The novels of Flann O’Brien

Reviewed by John Updike, 11th February 2008

Begob, and the truth would not be played false were a frank man to say that Flann O’Brien, born Brian O’Nolan in Strabane, Ulster, in 1911, and known as Myles na gCopaleen to the readers of his long-standing column “Cruiskeen Lawn” in the Irish Times, when acting as a novelist proffered a mixed bag of blessings and their opposite. Such a pained reflection has been given rise to by a thorough if at intervals dozy reading of “The Complete Novels” by the above-named, as published by Everyman’s Library in its fine format, not less than eight hundred pages (counting the front matter) of wee Bembo type bound in glorious red covers with a sewn-in bookmark of golden fabric ($25). On the jacket the author is obscured by his dark hat and his black-rimmed glasses and his own hand at his mouth, and, to be sure, Flann/Brian/Myles, where many an author not only rejoices in his face on his jacket but sets his personal facts in the forefront of his prose, engaged in a significant effort of self-concealment, of pseudonymity lurking behind a prose greatly melodious and garrulous in its confident manner. The front flap of the same jacket states him to be “along with Joyce and Beckett . . . part of the holy trinity of modern Irish literature,” which rings strangely of one who disparaged the Holy Trinity, discounting with considerable scholarly fury in his final novel, “The Dalkey Archive,” the very notion of the Holy Ghost, as having been heedlessly foisted upon the Christian Creed by the Council of Alexandria in the year 362. The man was ingenious and learned like Jim Joyce and like Sam Beckett gave the reader a sweet dose of hopelessness but unlike either of these worthies did not arrive at what we might call artistic resolution. His novels begin with a swoop and a song but end in an uncomfortable murk and with an air of impatience.

The first, “At Swim-Two-Birds” (1939), is the best known and the most rigorously confusing—confusing even the compendium’s introducer, Keith Donohue, who describes it as “a mock-heroic novel about a man named Orlick Trellis,” when in fact Orlick is the relatively incidental son of Dermot Trellis, a bedridden author introduced, on page 31, as “writing a book on sin and the wages attaching thereto.” In equipping himself for this mighty task he “has bought a ream of ruled foolscap” and “is compelling all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them.” Dermot Trellis is enough captivated by the beauty of Sheila Lamont, a character he has invented to illustrate female virtue, “that he so far forgets himself as to assault her himself.” Not only assaults: he impregnates her. Their child is Orlick, who, after an education in the home of the Pooka MacPhellimey—one of several figures from Irish legend that have materialized in the narrative—becomes a writer himself, coached by three idlers called Shanahan, Furriskey, and Antony Lamont, the abused woman’s brother, all of them intent upon indicting and punishing, by way of Orlick’s fledgling fiction, his father’s perfidy. The elder Trellis is kept immobilized in his bed by surreptitiously drug-induced sleep while his characters, including a number of American cowboys recruited from the novels of one William Tracy, run wild. At least, that’s what I think is happening. The manuscript keeps re-starting itself, repeating whole paragraphs at a time, and the only segments of Irish life that savor of actual experience are the unnamed narrator’s passing conversations with his sententious uncle and with his flippant acquaintances at University College, Dublin. It is this unnamed narrator, easily confused with the young Flann O’Brien, who is composing this many-levelled travesty of a novel. Graham Greene called “At Swim-Two-Birds” “one of the best books of our century. A book in a thousand .