The Erl-King

The Erl-King is a magisterial tale of innocence, perversion and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges, from submissive schoolboy to adult misfit - a man without a sense of belonging, a bespectacled giant, with a mysterious attraction to children, a mystic preoccupation with life's symbols and an obsession with freshness - uncooked foods and raw meat, until he finds himself a prisoner of war, and then a teacher, and then the 'ogre' of a Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn. Michel Tournier's masterpiece rivets the reader until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich.