Fatherhood looms large in all three of these bestselling Dutch novels. Two of them are dramatised examinations of men as fathers, the other is haunted by the memory of a father. The men in the first two are both caring fathers, excellent cooks, meticulous lovers and sensitive partners. But if you can rely on them both to choose the right wine and knock up a decent Tuscan meal, you can also expect them to do the wrong thing in a crisis, drink too much and punch you in the nose rather than discuss things rationally, writes Peter Sirr
Without Mercy. By Renate Dorrestein. Translated from the Dutch by Hester Velmans. Doubleday. 293 pp. £12.99 sterling
Without Mercy, Renate Dorrestein's second novel to be translated into English, is a relentless pursuit of the gradual destruction of a marriage after the random shooting of a couple's 15-year-old son. The novel's real focus is the nature of fatherhood and maleness: Phinus is an inventor of children's games, a skilled cook and fierce in his love of his son. Part of his demented anger as the book develops stems from the assumption that, because he's not the biological father, his fatherhood is somehow less real. The narrative fairly races from incident to incident in a spiral of extremity that sometimes strains credulity, yet we're also jerked backwards and forwards in a complex time scheme that heightens suspense but can seem a willed delaying tactic.
The novel is at its best in its portrayal of the worsening relationship of Franka and Phinus, with some memorable set pieces, and in the depiction of Phinus's agonised love for his son. Violence plays a large part in the novel and is very much seen as a male force. A random act of violence sets up the story, and further violence follows. The thesis being explored seems to be that men are given to acts of violence because they don't know how else to articulate their emotions, though in fairness the novel's women are as repressed, deceived and emotionally inchoate as its men.
A Father's Affair. By Karel van Loon. Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. Canongate Books. 199 pp. £9.99 sterling
A Father's Affair proceeds from the dilemma that ensues when its protagonist discovers that he is and always has been infertile, and that 13-year-old Bo is not after all his son. Since Bo's mother, Monika, died 10 years ago, Armin can't ask her who the father his. This somewhat contrived premise - is it the milkman? The best friend? The doctor? - is what drives the novel, and Armin's quest to discover the identity of the father turns the novel into a whodunit for the new man, which also includes a wealth of useful information about the always surprising activities of sperm (Armin is a proofreader for a scientific journal).
A healthy adult male of about 30 who goes to bed twice a week with the same partner produces 300 million sperm cells every time he has an orgasm. But if he has a fling with a woman he knows already has a partner, he will leave behind twice as many sperm cells: more than 600 million. In an ejaculation containing 600 million spermatozoids, only 1 million are capable of fertilising an egg cell.
Van Loon's publishers are marketing him as a Dutch Nick Hornby, and it's not hard to see why. All the ingredients are there for the perfect men's novel: angst about paternity; tender fatherhood; plenty of sex (Armin first encountered his current partner in a lengthily described threesome with Monika); plenty of hard information, drink and the kind of absurdities that lovable but not necessarily adult men get up to. The extent to which readers enjoy this novel depends on how much they identify with the laddish and often crass Armin and can ignore the creaky machinations of the plot. The least contrived and most moving moments are those which focus on the relationship between father and whatever it is that Bo has become.
Van Loon and Dorrestein both follow the form of the topical thriller, resolutely contemporary, stuffing as much of the world as possible into their books: "Monika was also deeply in love with her canary-yellow Renault 5 . . ." Otto de Kat, on the other hand, delivers a novel from which much of the world had been removed. The Figure in the Distance comes recommended by Cees Nooteboom and has many of the qualities of Nooteboom's fiction: a cool and cerebral narrative style, classical poise and brevity.
The Figure in the Distance. By Otto van de Kat. Translated from the Dutch by Arnold and Erica Pomerans. The Harvill Press.pp 86. £10 sterling
The novel is presented in a series of brief passages that follow the narrator from New York to Zurich, Cambridge, the Hague, Budapest and the English South Downs at different stages of his life, and with constant intercutting to the Holland of his childhood. The unnamed and very lightly specified narrator travels with his burden of memories, his life recounted with a strange mixture of neutrality and passion, in which only the past is real. That life is suspended between the twin obsessions of the loss of his father and his love of the mysterious K.; its other lineaments are deliberately subdued.
What exactly he is or does is blurred, though the novel is full of sensory exactitude produced by the narrator's obsessive imagination. There's a Nabokovian relish of detail alongside an elegant suppression of the world, and it's no accident that he sits in a café with an unread and about to be discarded copy of Speak, Memory in front of him.
This is a novel of the withheld as much as of the revealed, everything filtered out except the absolute essentials, the figure of the father coming ever more sharply into focus. It's a novel which has no designs on us, other than to haunt us with its quietly accumulating power.
Peter Sirr is a poet and critic