
DATE: Thursday, October 2, 1997             TAG: 9710020812
SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review 

SOURCE: BY ADAM BERNSTEIN, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

NOVEL ``DOG KING'' IS POETIC BUT LUMBERING

AUSTRIAN NOVELIST Christoph Ransmayr is a stylist.

In the case of ``The Dog King,'' his third novel, that means he concentrates more on the beauty of his words than on his plotting.

Although the poetry and imagination of Ransmayr's tale can impress, the book seems more tortoise de force than tour de force. It's slow and cumbersome.

Ransmayr restyles history during and since World War II. His novel is set in Moor, an isolated village in the Alps, where the end of the European war has meant tightly regulated agricultural communities, overseen by the Allied victors.

But the war is still being fought in Asia, we are told, and continues raging for 20 years after the real war ended in 1945.

A few characters in Moor are at the tale's center. There is Bering, a blacksmith and general handyman who was prone as a child to crying like a bird: ``He was a chicken, was a collared dove, was a screech-owl.'' A sensitive, introverted lad, Bering has known only war and destruction. He contracts an eye disease that eats away at his vision. Oddly enough, Bering acts as the bodyguard of Ambras, known as the Dog King.

Ambras is a local, granite quarry/internment camp survivor. As the story progresses, he is made the Allied administrator of the quarry. He lives there, in relative seclusion and haunted by the death of his Jewish wife, with just a pack of wild dogs, whom he lords over.

A few other assorted characters enter the story, including Lily, a beautiful mountain girl, for whom Bering falls.

The novel delivers a jolt when Ambras, Bering and Lily leave Moor, boarding a ship to Brazil. Ransmayr's writing then shifts to an overripe brightness as the characters head toward their fates. Continuous animal imagery reminds us of the heightened Darwinian struggle of post-war existence. All of these quiet characters are trapped by their ghosts. There is little dialogue.

Many passages, though poetic, get clogged by too many ideas and sentences that continue for too long, for example: ``Lily could kill. A woman alone in the mountains, alone somewhere in the hotel ruins high above the lake, she had to flee again and again from the lust of the gangs, had to bound down slopes, escaping into the wilderness, often into the night, running from murderers and arsonists, had to hide in the ravines of the Stony Sea, in some thicket along the lakeshore, or in caves.''

But worse yet are some painful alliterations. One particularly bad example: ``He sees the penitents sink into the snow, slowly, stiff with cold - and with open mouths, just as the Dog King commanded. Only their flags and banners still flutter above the icy swells like the sails of a sinking ship.''

Of course, this could be the fault of the translator. ``The Dog King'' was originally written in German. For his novel, Ransmayr shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's Aristeion Prize for 1996.

Every so often, a nice image or lovely use of words appears. For instance: ``With the shriek of the ship's siren brushed along the shoreline and then returned from the heights of the Stony Sea, swarms of coots and gulls fluttered up from Moor's promenade, traced uneasy arcs out over the lake, and then, laughing shrilly with relief, glided back to the reeds.''

But this is a rare occurrence: a delightful, evocative passage that presents a mood, without slipping into silly poetics and an indecipherable plotline that grudgingly advances. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MARY JAVOREK

Christoph Ransmayr won Europe's Aristeion Prize for his novel.

Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``The Dog King''

Author: Christoph Ransmayr, translated by John E. Woods

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf.

355 pp.

Price: $24