The Third Party invites immediate comparison with fashionable writers like David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami by being set in Japan, but the essence seems more Lost in Translation (which the book explicitly acknowledges at one point) than number9dream. Our unnamed narrator is a fortysomething executive for a plastics company which has developed an ‘exciting new storage solution’ - “clingfilm would soon be consigned to the pedal binof history.” He is staying in a hotel in Hiroshima for a conference with clients.
And so the story progresses in a slow and elliptical fashion, as he meets various fellow travellers and visits tourist attractions both on and off the beaten track. Among the people he meets is a fellow Northern Irish writer, referred to as ‘Ike,’ and some of whose details may be catharsis on Patterson’s part.
