With just a few weeks left of the year the only way I’m going to catch up on the backlog of reviews is to batch a few of them in one post.
The Dinner by Herman Koch
This was an interesting take on a moral dilemma. It poses the question of how far parents will go to protect their children, even when they have committed a despicable act. Two brothers – one a political leader tipped for the top, the other a teacher with a bit of a past – and their wives meet for dinner in an upmarket restaurant in Amsterdam. We discover that this encounter is organised not as a social occasion but to discuss what stance to take about a crime committed by 15 year old sons. The nature of that crime, and the resentment the teacher feels towards his more successful brother, is revealed slowly as dinner progresses. The dinner itself is wonderfully funny if you enjoy laughing at the pretentiousness found in the kind of restaurant favoured by foodies. The provenance of every item on the plate is described in minute detail by a oleaginous maître d’ determined to get through his script though all the guests want to do is get stuck in. The humour nicely counters the darker elements of the narrative.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Apparently this 2015 best seller was labelled as “the next Gone Girl“. There is some similarity. Both titles featured the word “girl” (clever me for spotting that…); both had page-turning plots with more twists and turns than you’d encounter driving along the Big Sur and both stories were relayed by a narrator whose reliability came in at around level 2 on the credibility scale. There I think the similarity ends. The Girl on the Train had a murder plot that turned on the ingenious device of memory loss by a narrator drinking excessively to deal with a broken marriage. Without giving any of the plot away all I can say is that this was a highly entertaining read.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Doerr won the National Book Award with this novel set in France and Germany before and during the German occupation of France. It’s told through the eyes of two children; one is a blind girl living in Paris with her beloved Papa, a locksmith and creator of intricate puzzles; the other is an orphan with a remarkable gift for radio technology and transmitters. He can fix anything. On opposite sides of the war, their stories gradually come together as war rages over St Malo. I couldn’t warm to this book despite some clearly well researched details. The narrative seemed overly drawn out and the first 100 pages were very dull in fact. It wasn’t so bad that I felt I wanted to give up but it was really only the last quarter that was particularly interesting.
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer
This was chosen by my Book Club much to my dismay. I hadn’t long finished reading the excellent Elisabeth is Missing by Emma Healey and the thought of another novel on the topic of mental illness wasn’t appealing. But I’m so glad I didn’t skip Filer’s debut novel. He created a completely engaging narrator in the form of Matt Homes, a 19-year-old schizophrenic who was sectioned because he couldn’t cope in the community. With the aid of an old typewriter he tries to convey feelings of guilt about something that happened to his brother (the nature of which we don’t discover until close to the end of the novel). Letters, doodles and sketches are mingled within his text. Matt knows however that there are limits to his memory and his ability to be honest about painful moments in his life. Filer brilliantly invests Matt with a caustic sense of humour which he deploys towards the condescension and jargon he experiences in psychiatric treatment. Quite simply this was such a superb novel I read it in one day.