Dutch author Herman Koch is best known for The Dinner, his 2012 global bestseller about a meal at a swanky restaurant that descends into a slanging match. The novel was notable for its relentless nastiness: at its heart is a horrific act of teenage violence (which the meal has been convened to discuss), and the adults are all equally ghastly. This grimness may be the best explanation for its success: there was a sense that Koch was holding up a mirror to bourgeois life, and revealing – none too subtly – the darkness at its heart.
Koch’s latest novel is set in a broadly similar milieu. Narrator Robert Walter is the mayor of Amsterdam (one of the diners in The Dinner was a famous politician). Everything about his life seems correct, well-ordered: he is contentedly married, with a delightful teenage daughter, and his professional life involves plenty of hobnobbing with the rich and famous (Bill Clinton, he reports, is a “turbo-charged version of myself”). Aside from an intense aversion to wind turbines, Robert appears to have few convictions or principles: his skill lies in that old politicians’ trick – telling people what they want to hear. Yet while he is cynical, you can’t help warming to him – and he’s certainly more sympathetic than any of the characters in The Dinner.
Yet, inevitably, a serpent steals into paradise. At the city’s new year bash, Robert spots his wife, Sylvia, chatting with an unprepossessing alderman. The alderman says something that makes Sylvia laugh and, for a split-second, his hand rests on her elbow. This is the only prompt that Robert’s imagination needs: he is instantly cast into a world of suspicion. Are Sylvia and the alderman having an affair? On the surface, it seems unlikely, but soon Robert is devoting every waking moment to mentally pursuing this possibility.
As an exploration of pathological jealousy, The Ditch is largely convincing. Koch is especially good at inhabiting Robert’s looking-glass world, in which every little thing becomes grounds for suspicion. On a weekend break to Paris, Sylvia affectionately teases her husband. “Would she still tease me (and smile and wink),” he asks, “if she were having an affair with Maarten van Hoogstraten?” But then a darker thought intrudes: is her friendliness merely a “five-star performance”, put on for the express purposes of allaying his suspicion? At a certain point, jealousy becomes almost indistinguishable from comedy in the lengths to which it goes to distort reality.
The focus on Robert’s jealousy, however, proves short-lived. Other plotlines come to the fore: the imminent deaths of Robert’s ageing parents; a possible scandal from his past. His jealousy, it becomes clear, had a defensive function: it was a means to distract him from more pressing (and real) concerns. Yet this realisation doesn’t particularly help the novel. The various strands never fully cohere, and in an apparent effort to make them do so, Koch makes his characters do implausible things. Nothing in the book’s latter stages proves as compelling as the paranoia it initially explored. The Ditch, you can’t help feeling, would have been more successful had it cleaved more tightly to its opening theme.
• The Ditch by Herman Koch (translated by Sam Garrett) is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
