Greig Douglas works as a bookseller at the Walmer Park branch of Exclusive Books in Port Elizabeth. Greg tries to read as widely as possible but is a self confessed 'sucker for anything written by a Russian in the nineteenth century.'
Paul Lohman, the narrator of Herman Koch’s unpredictable thriller The Dinner, loves his family: Claire, his wife, who has hair that ‘smells of happiness’ and his son, Michel, whom he sometimes remembers as the ‘blue, crumpled little body’ they almost lost after a difficult birth.
But this is an illusion that quickly begins to unravel over the claustrophobic setting of a single dinner at an exclusive Amsterdam restaurant. Paul and Claire attend at the insistence of Serge, Paul’s brother, a rising figure on the Dutch political scene. As the dinner begins to unfold, Paul offers the reader a series of damning riffs on everything from the fatuousness of his brother Serge’s self-styled piety to the pretentiousness of fine dining.
What emerges is a scathing picture of European middle-class values told in affectless, accessible prose. This is an easy target for Koch’s satire and, while dark and funny, pales in comparison to the actual reason for their gathering: they are meeting to discuss a video – more specifically, footage of their children committing a heinous act that has circulated widely on Dutch television and, in a pleasing contemporary touch, YouTube. The perpetrators remain unidentified, but Paul and Serge know exactly who they are: their sons.
With their boys’ futures (and possibly a national election) at stake, what are they to do? Does Paul care enough about his loathsome brother to do the right thing by him? What is best for his son, and how did Michel commit this terrible act in the first place?
The real pleasure of the storytelling lies in Koch’s patient unveiling of Paul’s interior life and the fractured, unstable relationship he has with his family. As he opens up and slowly fills in the gaps, our understanding of Paul grows progressively more duplicitous. The Dinner excels at the art of the slow reveal, with Koch consistently delivering believable, well-timed twists delivered in the voice of an increasingly menacing unreliable narrator forced to confront his own role in his son’s macabre crime.
Like Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, this is a novel that asks disturbing questions without trying to answer them definitively. Questions mostly about family: do we, for example, ever truly understand the people we love? And when they do bad things, will going to any lengths to protect them actually make us happy?
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