Uk Times article talks about 3rd policeman

[Sydney]

An article from the UK Times newspaper which talks about connections between the Third policeman and Lost

It also briefly mentions that season 2 of Lost will be shown in the UK in May

Look away now

By Jack Malvern

A surrealist novel written in 1940 has been rescued from obscurity after writers for the television drama Lost let slip that it was crucial to thier cryptic plots.
The Third Policeman, an absurdist story about the atomic theory of bicycles and the quest for a mysterious black box, does not seem an obvious source material for the most popular American drama ever broadcast by Channel 4. but Craig Wright, a co-writer of the series, provoked a sales surge when he told viewers that the late flann O'Brien's book would give them "a lot more ammunition" in dissecting his story of survivors of an air crash on a remote desert island.
The book's US publisher sold 10,000 copies within two days of the title's appearance in the second series of the programme, which will be shown here in May.
HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corperation, parent company of The Times, reported an immeadiate increase in sales in the British Isles, from 400 copies in January to 4,500 in February. It has reprinted 10,000 copies ready for another surge. readers who prefer to keep their mysteries intact should look away at this point:

Both stories feature people who suffer a terrible accident that transports them to an unfamiliar world in which the laws of physics seem to break down. Both involve characters who meet people they know to be dead. Both have seaquences in whihc the characters discover mysterious subterranean lairs.
the book's denoument, in which the narrator finds out that he has been dead all along, will add to the speculation that the island represents the afterlife.

A copy of the novel appears in the third episode of the second series, when the characters have broken into an underground complex. There they discover a new character, Desmond, whose bookshelf contains The Third Policeman.

Wright said that the prominent display of the book was an intentional clue. "This book was chosen for a reason," he told the Chicago Tribune"Whoever goes out and buys the book will have alot more ammunition as they theorise about the show. They will have alot more to speculate about."

neither O'Brien nor Wright has much respect for natural laws. The author, who died in 1966, declared: "When you are writing about the world of the dead and the damned where none of the rules and laws holds good, there is any amount of scope for backchat and funny cracks."

Both the series and the book contain machines that threaten disasterous consequences if they do not recieve regular attention. In Lost, someone must enter a code into a computer every 108 minutes; the policemen in the book must tinker with a machine daily to keep its readouts constant. there is a suggestion that the island is a hullucination. The book's prologue suggets: "Human existance being a hallucination containing in itself the secondary hullucinations of day and night...it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusionary approach of the supreme hallucination known as death."

Fans of the series have suggested that the story in all in the mind of one or more of the characters. Lost enthusiasts will still have plenty to speculate about, however. the writers have already dismissed theories that the survivors are dead, in a time warp or a figment of one of anyone's imaginateion.