The bestselling author of The Dinner takes a critical scalpel to his own work in this metafictional mystery with a twist
“What is wrong with wanting to ‘relate’ to a character when reading fiction?” asks Will Eaves in his brilliant recent investigation into the relationship between life and art, The Inevitable Gift Shop. It’s an important question – and one that arises in relation to the work of the Dutch novelist Herman Koch, author of The Dinner and Summer House with Swimming Pool. Koch specialises in stories in which unpleasant and unreliable narrators describe nasty people doing not very nice things. In fairness, his interest in the unlikable and unrelatable doesn’t seem to have done him any harm: The Dinner sold more than a million copies worldwide. Perhaps we are fascinated with his contemptible characters because they remind us of ourselves. “‘I didn’t relate to any of the characters’ means ‘I caught sight of my rage in the mirror’,” suggests Eaves. Perhaps Koch is simply doing what authors have always done: holding up a mirror to nature. In Dear Mr M Koch turns the hoary old metaphor into a complex fictional conceit.
The narrator of the novel is stalking Mr M, a famous writer whose most successful book was about a young man and his girlfriend who were suspected of the murder of one of their teachers. It soon transpires that the narrator is in fact the young man suspected of the murder, now older and looking for vengeance. It also turns out that Koch’s unreliable narrator this time around is not the narrator of Mr M, but the narrator of Mr M’s book. If you think this all sounds a bit meta-meta then you’d be right: for all its pretensions to plot, Dear Mr M consists in large part of Koch’s reflections on his own writing practices and procedures.
In fairness, he is utterly unsparing in his judgments. “I’ve had the same sensation with all your books,” complains the narrator. “You take a bite and start chewing, but it doesn’t taste like much. It’s hard to swallow. On the other hand, though, it’s not really bad enough to summon the waiter and demand in a huff that the dish be brought back to the kitchen.” Waiter! “What is it we look for in a book? That someone goes through a process of maturation – that he achieves insight? But imagine if that process and that insight simply aren’t there? Wouldn’t that, in fact, be much more like life itself?” Yes, it would. “I sometimes wonder what that must feel like, mediocrity... To what extent is [the mediocre man] aware of his mediocrity? Is he locked up inside his own mediocre mind and does he run around tugging at doors and windows, trying to get someone to let him out?” I couldn’t possibly comment.
Apart from this commentary on the vanities and stupidities of the writing life – the endless and necessary lies and evasions, the pointless prizes and awards, the horrors of the publishing world – there is a kind of novel within the novel, which tells the story of the young couple and their relationship with the sad and lonely teacher, Mr Landzaat. This is perhaps the least successful part of the book: long passages describing the lives of young people on the brink of adulthood, forming relationships, hanging out together, trying to work out their place in the world. It is a portrait of adolescent ennui that risks producing the same effect in the reader. There is little that goes unsaid about even the most minor of characters and there is no stinting on the detail: “What the kitchen counter resembled most was the stadium filed after a rock concert. Here there were no empty cans, though, no shards of glass and shredded sheets of black plastic, but filthy pans, plates, cutlery with the caked-on remains of mashed potatoes, scattered butt-ends of endives and globs of dried-up mustard.” What this prose resembles most is page filling.
Like all of Koch’s novels, Dear Mr M works ultimately through the deliberate withholding of information: it is a book, like all his books, with a final and magnificent twist. Whether or not readers will have the patience and interest to wait for the final twist depends rather on whether they are interested in all the little swerves and sleights along the way.
Ian Sansom’s Death in Devon is published by 4th Estate. To order Dear Mr M for £12.29 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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