The Dog King

Here's some revisionist history for you: World War II has ended, but only in the West. The war in the Pacific will drag on for another 20 years before the atomic bomb is finally dropped at Hiroshima; in Germany, instead of the Marshall Plan, the victorious Allies have instituted a policy based on vengeance. The country has been completely deindustrialized: factories are torn down, roads destroyed, and the economy shattered. People live hardscrabble existences, scraping a living from the soil if they are honest, preying on others if they are not. Throughout the countryside, granite memorials have been erected as constant reminders of the Germans' transgressions, and long lines of repentant citizens pray before them for forgiveness that never comes. Such is the bleak landscape of German author Christoph Ransmayr's third novel, The Dog King. Ransmayr constructs his dystopian tale around three characters: Bering, a young man who lives near the quarry that provides the special green granite for the memorials; Ambras, the crippled master of the quarry; and Lily, known as "the Brazilian" for her attempt to seek refuge in South America. Having assembled his cast, Ransmayr sends them on a journey from the horrors of postwar Germany to the jungles of Brazil in search of more green granite. What happens there makes for a sensational ending to a very disturbing tale.