The dog king

by Christoph Ransmayr

World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past. The bomb has not yet been dropped - nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, o