The Third Party [Paperback]

As I was going to be travelling through the same country -- nay, exact city of Hiroshima -- as author Glenn Patterson, I thought I'd read The Third Party (978-0856408090) during my actual journey. That was rewarding: Patterson's script and detail as his characters wander through the place of the atomic bomb was truly accurate and a joy to read.

I understood the character development also, between the relatively dull protagonist and a complementary, more mysterious character, an unlikely star writer who's come from a chequered background. For the first half of the novel, I didn't mind the conversations and tension between the two.

The pace quickens in the last third, and the climatic event is left very late. I won't spoil it, but I was rather disappointed. Considering the use of subtlety and exposing the complications that is mature adulthood (demonstrations of accomplished writing), the sudden halt came across like a secondary school essay. It's the reason I don't watch soap operas; they're so predictable, and the ending to The Third Party left me feeling cheated. But perhaps that's Patterson's point?

Glenn Patterson, for those who haven't come across him, is a giant in the world of contemporary Northern Ireland fiction. So was one of the principle characters in The Third Party - known only as Ike (short for icon). Now the world of contemporary Northern Ireland fiction is not very populous, and its main players are Patterson himself, Robert McLiam Wilson, David Park and Bernard MacLaverty. Inevitably one will try to find elements of these writers in Ike, and I suspect Ike is an amalgam of at least three of them.

Anyway, Ike is a leading Northern Ireland writer attending a conference on Conflict Writing in Hiroshima. He appears to be something of a guest of honour and has collected a small entourage of groupies around him.

Meanwhile, the unnamed narrator, a sales rep for a plastics firm from Northern Ireland is staying at the same hotel whilst trying to sell a new concept in food wrapping. Inevitably, for this is the world of the novel, the narrator and Ike bump into one another and so, on his last full day in Japan, the narrator is asked to join Ike and his groupies for breakfast.

The odd couple in Japan in not a new concept, and neither is the foreigner adrift in Japan. The novel this seemed most closely to resemble was In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murukami. It shares the same level of lurid detail - the clinical, clean, neon-lit world of sleaze and drudgery. It shares the feeling of anonymity and drift of the foreigner abroad, cut off from all grounding in reality, family and responsibility. And like In The Miso Soup, a growing sense of menace starts to develop. In the case of The Third Party it develops quite late - the novel is short (168 pages) and it is only in the last third that things really start to seem not quite right. It is subtley done, but it does make the first two thirds of the novel seem like a rather inconsequential meander through the Hiroshima scenery. Perhaps the narrator's fascination with the A-Bomb Museum seems a bit strange, but it is a strange place and the narrator does seem to have time on his hands to fill.

But in the final third, as the narrator's last day draws to an end and the alcohol starts to flow, we find ourselves joining the characters in an alcohol fuelled stupor. Whereas the first part of the novel is written in Patterson's trademark clarity, the second part is hazy, fuzzy; we aren't quite clear where everyone really stands with one another. And very unusually for a Patterson novel, the ending seems sudden and inappropriate. The issues don't resolve themselves - they are left hanging.

This is a very strange novel, and quite atypical of Patterson, but there is much to commend it. Patterson has rediscovered his touch in letting paragraphs, sentences even, flick back and forth between times, viewpoints, ideas. Patterson's main characters are complex and have contradictions between their positive and negative qualities. Patterson again writes around Northern Ireland - it pops up every now and then - but whilst focusing on people rather than politics.

Glenn Patterson is a class act and perhaps this novel is not quite up there with The International or Fat Dad as his finest work, it puts plenty of other writers to shame. That's why I am sorry to see the novel published by Blackstaff Press, which will ensure it is hardly seen outside Ireland. But on a positive note, Patterson's early novels are being re-released by Blackstaff which will at least allow Irish audiences to marvel at one of their unsung heroes.