The Dinner by Anna Davis

I have been reading a number of debut novels recently. Although “The Dinner” was originally published back in 1999 I found Anna Davis’s debut to be an acerbic treat. The events of the novel take place during the course [or courses] of one suburban dinner-party, which slowly and spectacularly descends into a surreal nightmare reminiscent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

The four couples at the dinner party each have a host of dark secrets which slowly surface, as they try to deal with an unbalanced and unexpected ninth guest whose unsettling presence triggers the unravelling of their respective lives.

I was impressed by the way that Davis handles her cast and creates sufficient differentiation between the characters to enable the reader to mentally hold them without confusing the couples and their personalities. Davis’s writing is at times as precise as a surgeon’s blade, and she creates painfully accurate portraits of her unlikeable cast with their competitive point-scoring and manipulative strategies.

As I was reading I kept sensing a number of resonances. The first was Mike Leigh’s 1977 play “Abigail’s Party” with the wonderful Alison Steadman. This painful study of middle-class manners kept echoing through my head as Davis slowly unfolded her plot. The other resonance was an obscure Danish film called “Babette’s Feast” written and directed by Gabriel Axel from a story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). The vivid descriptions of the food that Davis creates reminded me of the banquet sequence in the movie, particularly in the clever use of colour imagery.

Davis has created a cast of unlovable characters, and one of my problems with the early part of the novel was the lack of empathy that I felt towards any of the main nine characters. However I think it is a testament to her skill as a writer that by the end of the novel I felt far more sympathy with each of the characters; they may still have been horrible people, yet I found myself hoping for some sense of redemption for each of them.

The tightly focused time-frame of the book creates a wonderfully compressed sense of tension, which Davis alleviates with some deft flashbacks to balance the metronomic chronology.

As a debut novel this is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of work. However if I were the author I would have been incensed by the publishers including a quote on the book jacket from Attitude Magazine: “A stunning off-the-shoulder debut in suicide red”, which seems to me to be a spoiler of monumental proportions.