The Dinner, by Herman Koch - review

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The two teenage cousins have committed an act of grotesque and unprovoked viciousness for which Paul’s son, in particular, remains unrepentant and the parents gather at a fancy restaurant to try to formulate a coherent response.

The novel is narrated by Paul, whose splenetic, green-eyed contempt for everything, from the pretensions of the waiting staff to the holiday preferences of his brother, provides much of the book’s bleak and bone-dry humour. And for the first half of the novel, Paul’s internal rant is indeed very funny, in the way that being stuck in a lift with a strange cousin of Alf Garnett might be funny, not least because you know it will eventually end. Which it duly does, and when the main course arrives, and we get to the meat of the story, the mood darkens and the book takes an altogether more complex turn. By pudding we are firmly in psychological thriller territory and all the better for it.

If the interest in the first half is all in the voice of Paul, in the final third of the book the action takes over and the novel’s build-up to its spine-chillingly brilliant ending makes it easy to forgive the multiple implausibilities of the plot (among them the unlikelihood of two sets of parents, including a prominent and widely recognised public figure, choosing to discuss a serious crime committed by their respective sons in the very exposed surroundings of a restaurant) and just go along for the ride.

Like its more accomplished literary stablemates, The Slap and We Need to Talk about Kevin, The Dinner is a conversation piece as much as a novel, as designed to be chewed over among friends as it is to be read alone. Which is not to underplay its literary merits. The very peculiar toxicity of Paul’s voice and the luscious build-up of suspense towards the denouement are alone worth the price (and the reading) of the book but The Dinner is more compelling still for the questions it asks about loyalty, morality, sibling rivalry and parental responsibility.

“How far would you go to protect the ones you love?” teases the jacket, but this misses the point, because the really shocking secret of Koch’s world is that, for Paul at least, we find ourselves way beyond love, in tribal territory where the unconscious narcissistic pull of genetic heritage holds sway and the phrase “like father, like son” takes on a grim, unswerving dynamic all its own. It makes for a discomforting, absorbing read.

I’m confidently predicting that The Dinner will become this summer’s literary talk of the town — and the Twittersphere — here in the UK, as it already is in Continental Europe, where the novel has sold more than a million copies. Order yours now.

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