“The Third Party” is one of my favorites in the Collected, a story that has stuck with me ever since I first read it perhaps 15 years ago. The set-up is simple: two men, strangers to each other, meet in a Dublin bar. We quickly learn that the big man, Boland, is there to meet his wife’s lover, the smaller Lairdman. Annabella, Boland’s wife, suggested the meeting in hopes it would bring Boland around to the reality of her long infidelity and plans to leave him. Lairdman wants to move Annabella into his “seven room flat in the Wellington Road” and start a family with her, and he wants Boland to agree to a divorce. In the course of the conversation, during which Lairdman drinks mineral water and Boland consumes Jameson after Jameson, we learn—via Boland’s focal point of view—that Lairdman and Boland went to the same school. Lairdman was a “day boy”—a local boy who left at the end of the day, and provincial Boland was a boarder. We learn that Lairdman had his head held down the toilet by bullies, a fact that Boland taunts him with after his third drink.
"The Third Party"
"The Third Party"
"The Third Party"
“The Third Party” is one of my favorites in the Collected, a story that has stuck with me ever since I first read it perhaps 15 years ago. The set-up is simple: two men, strangers to each other, meet in a Dublin bar. We quickly learn that the big man, Boland, is there to meet his wife’s lover, the smaller Lairdman. Annabella, Boland’s wife, suggested the meeting in hopes it would bring Boland around to the reality of her long infidelity and plans to leave him. Lairdman wants to move Annabella into his “seven room flat in the Wellington Road” and start a family with her, and he wants Boland to agree to a divorce. In the course of the conversation, during which Lairdman drinks mineral water and Boland consumes Jameson after Jameson, we learn—via Boland’s focal point of view—that Lairdman and Boland went to the same school. Lairdman was a “day boy”—a local boy who left at the end of the day, and provincial Boland was a boarder. We learn that Lairdman had his head held down the toilet by bullies, a fact that Boland taunts him with after his third drink.