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To cut a long story short(ish),
I’d left Will
Self at home by mistake (or rather, because it’s a hardback and my pannier
bags were stuffed with other work-related detritus) and was struggling to
overcome the temptation to simply watch crap television on the iPad during my
lunch break, when I remembered I could access my Kindle library through the
app. So, I went through the library to the earliest downloaded novel (ignoring
yet again the interminably long list of out-of-copyright, free-to-download ‘classics’
I’d grabbed the second I got my e-reader and may never, ever look at again) and
opened her up.
Thankfully, somehow, my
brain has redacted in its entirety the truly awful film version of this novel.
No, no, please don’t even tap it into Google or Bing or whatever. It’s a total
shit fest. How low Richard Gere has fallen…. And he dragged Steve Coogan down
with him too. There was every chance that, had I remembered watching its fully majestic
calamity, I would have deleted the e-book with extreme prejudice. And that
would have been to miss out on what is a properly hard-edged black satire.
Koch brings to mind Thomas
Bernhard with his loathing for his fellow Dutchman echoing Bernhard’s
rather unforgiving attitude to Austrians. He also manages to plop moments of
extreme violence into the still pond of family life, dropped from great heights
and with little warning. I don’t want to spoil the surprise so I won’t offer
examples, but the way that the backstory is drip-fed, like the thumb-nailing off
of the silver on a lottery scratch card, delivers big reveal after big reveal, outrageous
and impolitic (for the characters) and laying bare the false modesty and self-aggrandizing
tendencies of both the middle classes in WASPish cultures and those with
political ambitions.
Koch is ruthless with his
characters - none escapes his tarred brush and no-one is innocent. It’s brutal
given the class context and setting. His ability to manipulate the reader’s
impressions of the narrator’s family is masterful and there’s not a wasteful
line in the book – he writes with precision and clarity (or at least his
translator does). I started with expectations of a Le Dîner de Cons-type farce
but was very quickly disabused of my prejudices. Top marks to a writer of whom
I knew little and thanks be to whomever for my leaky memory which could have
prevented me from taking so much savage joy at the expense of a handful of subtly
deranged Dutchmen.
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