Review of TENCH by Inge Schilperoord (New Release)

4 Stars

This is an uncomfortable, disturbing read but compelling at the same time.

Jonathan, a thirty-year-old man, is released from prison after being acquitted on appeal due to insufficient forensic evidence and inconsistencies in the victim’s story.  The offence with which he was charged is not directly named but it soon becomes clear that it was of a sexual nature and involved a girl with developmental challenges.  Jonathan returns to live with his mother in their soon-to-be demolished house in a rundown neighbourhood.  Determined to control his urges, he adopts a strict daily routine.  All is well until nine-year-old Elke befriends him and the two bond over caring for an injured tench, a fish which Jonathan keeps in his aquarium. 

The protagonist is a lonely man who seems to have no friends.  He interacts only with his mother and Elke; though he has a job, “he kept aloof from everyone, like always.  According to the psychologist, secluding himself was a ‘survival mechanism’.”  He desperately wants to be a good person; when he returns home, he sets a rigid schedule for himself because he understands that controlling his environment and activities helps him control his behaviour, and he diligently does the exercises in his therapy workbook and tries to implement what he learned from his prison psychologist.  He considers one of his strengths to be “looking after other people . . . he’d considered this one of his best qualities.  Caring for others.”  He certainly tries to look after his mother and feels guilty that he was responsible for her being alone during his imprisonment.  So when a lonely young girl, who has no playmates in the largely deserted neighbourhood and whose parents are mostly absent, appears in his life, he feels he needs to take care of her.

To complicate the situation, Jonathan has no one to help him.  His mother never discusses his offense with him; her approach seems to be to forget about it.  Though she sees Elke in the house, she seems to think that by pretending nothing is happening, nothing will really happen.  Jonathan knows that his mother doesn’t understand him; he finds some Bible verses she’d copied out:  “Something about life being beyond your understanding and having to submit to the wisdom of God, and never being able to know another person completely.  .  . . that bit about others being unknowable had stayed with him.  Somehow he knew it was about him and it hurt.”  His mother’s only attempt to help him is to suggest he go to Bible study.  He lies about having attending a Bible meeting but “He didn’t need to turn around to see the expression on her face, to know that she knew he was lying.  But also that she wouldn’t say anything about it.”

Once he is released from prison, Jonathan also loses the help of his psychologist; his acquittal “cancelled out everything:  the prison sentence, the therapy, the psychiatric hospital.”  If he had remained in prison, he would have been placed “under a hospital order” which “could last a long time . . .  and the treatment could be extended every year, theoretically forever, until the psychiatrists and psychologists at the hospital judged him to be cured.”  In prison, Jonathan had received only “pre-therapy, as they called it.  Or ‘individual offender therapy’ therapy that started in prison and was meant to prepare him for treatment in the hospital.”  Though the prison psychologist estimates “a high likelihood of a repeat offence with crimes like [Jonathan’s],” all he has to help him are exercises from his pre-therapy workbook.  He admits, “As horrible as that hospital order had seemed, he would have liked to have carried on longer with the pre-therapy with the prison psychologist.  But that was all cancelled once he was acquitted.  Now he could only sign up voluntarily.  There was a centre in the city.  The psychologist had given him the telephone number, but he knew it was a step he would never dare take.”

Symbolism is used very effectively.  The injured tench symbolizes Jonathan.  He believes that “with good care he’d make it healthy again” just as he believes that by doing his therapy exercises he too will be well again.  Just as he has a daily schedule for his activities, he develops a daily schedule for taking care of the tench:  feeding times, water temperature checks, etc.  When he describes the fish, Jonathan could be describing himself:  “’it’s a shy, gentle fish. . . . It likes peace and quiet.  If there’s too much noise or if other animals get too close, it hides in the mud.  It gets scared easily.’”  Jonathan emphasizes that the fish needs cold water because hot water is dangerous for its health.  During the entire duration of the novel, there is a heat wave; there are at least two dozen references to it being unrelentingly, oppressively hot.  The fish has more and more difficulty coping with its environment and takes to hiding in the mud and Jonathan starts feel overwhelmed and finds it more and more difficult to control his thoughts when Elke increasingly imposes herself on his environment.  A description of the fish “floating on its back on the surface, pale belly up as if praying for help from on high, help that would never come” is ominous because Jonathan believes “his fate was linked to the fish.”

Reading Tench is like watching a film in which two trains on the same track are heading towards each other.  We are horrified and fascinated at the same time.  We hope that something can be done to divert the trains and prevent a collision, but a wreck seems inevitable.  Throughout the novel, as we see the direction of Jonathan’s thoughts, there is a growing sense of tension, but it becomes impossible to turn away.

The author, a Dutch criminal psychologist, manages to create a protagonist whose behaviour will repulse readers but for whom they will also have some compassion.  Schilperoord implies that society bears some responsibility in not insuring that Jonathan receives the help he needs.  The book is not lengthy but it is unsettling.  Because it is so thought-provoking, it will remain with me for some time.  

Note:  I  received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.