The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Dog King by Christoph RansmayrRobert Manaster
Christoph Ransmayr. The Dog King. Trans. John E. Woods. Knopf, 1997. 355 pp. $24.00.
Christoph Ransmayr’s The Dog King portrays the mythic, vulnerable, and often violent town of Moor, a microcosm of post-W.W. II Germany. Essentially, he presents a defeated Germany, depicting a mostly unspoken yet deeply felt humiliation and rage, perhaps echoing Treaty-of-Versailles sentiments. It’s clear Ransmayr empathizes with the people of Moor as victims. In accordance with the Peace of Oranienburg, Moor is forced “Back! . . . Back to the Stone Age!” And Moor does indeed decay into a machineless, farming, violent culture while literally working with stones, mining the quarry, which was the site of a small concentration camp. The novel begins with macabre descriptions of three dead people on an “uninhabited” Brazilian island, then unravels who and how. The main portion of the novel exhibits Moor’s decay through three main characters: Ambras, the Dog King; Bering, his blacksmith/bodyguard; and Lilly the mysterious, Brazilian black-market dealer. As in Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, landscape figures prominently. Similar to German myth, land is strong and virile though it’s plundered of prewar glory. The quarry is stripped; buildings and roads are neglected. Eventually, Moor is to be used as a military practice zone and has to be evacuated. Ambras the Dog King relays these orders, yet Moor seems to blame him in part. As a Moor camp survivor, he’s the Allies’ surrogate overseer of Moor. He is haunted by his past—a past that has little meaning for decaying Moor. He is left isolated, heartless, and almost maniacal, killing some wild dogs with his bare hands and training the rest to guard his crumbling villa. I recommend reading this imaginative work. [Robert Manaster]