Written by Herman Koch⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
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The blurb:
The DinnerA summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened...
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Literary Satire
Fiction
My thoughts:
The Dinner is told in the first person from the point of view of Paul Lohman, father of Michel and husband to Claire. Paul's brother, Serge Lohman, is a politician. He is leader of the opposition and assured of becoming Prime Minister at the next election. He has a wife, Babette, a daughter Valerie, and a son Ricky. The couple have also adopted Beau, a boy from Burkina Faso. Paul suspected that Serge had far-sighted political motivations for adopting Beau, and seems disappointed that he hasn't yet been proved right. Serge has insisted that Paul and Claire meet him and Babette for a meal in what Paul considers a pretentious restaurant. Serge says they need to discuss their children.
Paul avoids the subject for as long as he can, while filling us in on various events that shaped my view of the protagonists, including a shocking incident that their sons were involved in recently, and which, it transpires, is the reason for this dinner.
Any expectation that they will handle the matter as a family is brushed aside. Serge has already alerted his office that he will be making an announcement the next day. The dinner is just an opportunity to tell his brother how he, Serge, is going to deal with the matter. The other dinner guests disagree with Serge's plan, but can he be dissuaded from his intended course of action?
From the outset, I took against Serge, and thought Babette weak and manipulated, although most of my reasoning was drawn from Paul's observations of his brother. I thought I could sympathise with Claire and possibly Paul, but as time wore on, I realised that I didn't find any of the characters likeable, including the waiting staff in the restaurant. Regardless, the story was compelling. I could feel there was something much darker going on beneath the surface.
The story unfolds over the five course meal. It seemed slow to get going, but there is something darkly enticing about the writing that had me hooked from the beginning. My imagination suggested various plot lines as I sifted through the clues trying to discover where the story was headed. However, each time I thought I knew what was going on, I found I'd been wrong-footed. The ending left me open-mouthed, and answers the question posed in the blurb, "How far would you go to protect the ones you love?"
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