Het diner (The Dinner) is a portrayal of modern mores, exploring a contemporary moral dilemma about honesty and dirty tricks. After this dinner – you can hear the film music swell – nothing will ever be the same again. Brother Serge and his wife have a hidden agenda too. ‘That was how I saw life sometimes, like a plate of warm food sitting getting cold.’ Comforting and loyal as Paul’s wife initially seems, her true role in this horrifying story turns out in the end to be one of treachery.
Koch’s characters grapple with themselves in finely spun prose. Paul Lohman, a history teacher who’s taken early retirement, is full of aggression, both towards the restaurant with its pretentious food and service, and towards his brother, Serge Lohman, the popular politician whose ambition is to become premier of the Netherlands in the forthcoming elections. During the diner the dissatisfactions and frustrations that have smouldered for years rise to the surface. They are meeting to discuss what to do about their fifteen-year-old sons, partners in crime. In the most congenial of settings, a sumptuous dinner for two brothers and their wives at a fashionable establishment in the capital, knives are sharpened.
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