Hermann Koch - The Dinner

This book was recommended to me by a friend (thanks Amy!) and I'm so glad I read it. But I wish I hadn't read the last few pages in darkness, at night, when the rest of the household was asleep.

In all honesty, I don't think I have ever been as disturbed by any book, save for The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan. When I finished that book I was alone, and it was night (again - glutton for punishment, I guess), and I had to hide the phyiscal book under a pile of magazines so that I was unable to even glance by accident at the cover, so visceral was the fear it provoked in me.

The Dinner starts slow. It takes place over the course of a few hours, during a dinner at a posh restaurant  attended by two brothers, Paul and Serge Lohman, and their wives, Claire and Babette. Paul, the narrator, is a retired school-teacher (well - he has been placed 'on non-active', which we eventually find out is something entirely different from voluntarily retiring) who is put off by the self-interest he perceives in his brother's political ambitions. Serge is a politician on top of his game, likely to become the next Prime Minister of The Netherlands.

As the dinner progresses from aperitif to first course to main course etc, we learn more about the characters and, importantly, about their children. Much of the story is told by Paul as back story and his narration is therefore vital to our understanding of the relationships at play. It is only midway through the book that we start to doubt the reliability of his voice.

Conversation gradually turns to the issue that is central to the book, a violent act perpetrated by the 15 year old sons of each couple, and the different ways in which each couple wants to deal with the consequences and ramifications of this act.

About the plot, it is hard to say more without revealing spoilers. Other reviewers have compared this novel to Christos Tsolkias' The Slap, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, because both similarly focus on parents dealing with the actions / reactions of their children. What becomes clear during the course of The Dinner, and what is also dealt with in both of the above-mentioned books, is that it is the parents whose actions we should be concerned about, both because they are often in and of themselves abhorrent, and because they inform the conduct and belief systems of their children.

But The Dinner is chilling on an entirely different level. Without giving too much away, I will say that there is a particular part of this book that I am trying to forget because remembering it disturbs me so profoundly it will haunt me for weeks to come. I had recommended this to my mother, when I was about two thirds of the way through, but I am now going to withdraw that recommendation - I do not wish upon her the same nightmares I am suffering.

Pros: Hermann Koch writes well and with admirable restraint, and this is a tightly drawn novel that unfolds with great subtlety. The darkness central to it emerges ever so slowly, and the disturbing realities revealed at the end are all the more powerful because they were initially so unexpected.

Cons: In the first half I felt that some of the descriptions of the restaurant and the dinner itself were deliberately drawn out in an exaggerated way, to enable the device of framing the entire novel within the various courses of a single meal. That device sometimes felt contrived. As the novel progressed, however, I became drawn in to the story sufficiently that these issues ceased to bother me. Some readers will find it difficult, I imagine, to finish the novel once it becomes clear that none of the characters are particularly likeable (some are simply morally reprehensible) - but again, for me the story itself was by that stage developed enough and absorbing enough to overcome that problem. Perhaps of deepest concern for me was the fact that - because the story is being told by a terribly unreliable narrator - some of the most pronounced injustices in the book are inadequately addressed. Given the way the story was told there was probably no way for Koch to avoid this, and I appreciate that it adds to the unsettling nature of the ending, but it also left me a bit cold.

Overall assessment: three and a half stars out of five, verging on 4. It is a brilliantly conceived book, but whilst many reviewers have bandied about the word 'chilling' in relation to this work, I would go further than that, almost classifying the ending, at least, as horror; and that is not really my bag. I still want all of you to read it though - it's one of those books that gives rise to discussion.