''The Pork Butcher'' is a novel by

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

writer

David Hughes David Hughes may refer to: Arts *Dave Hughes (born 1970), Australian comedian *Dave Hughes (producer), American television producer and editor *David Hughes (illustrator), British illustrator *David Hughes (Emmerdale), fictional character in the I ...

, first published in 1984, and winner of the 1984 Welsh Arts council prize and the 1985

WH Smith Literary Award The WH Smith Literary Award was an award founded in 1959 by British high street retailer W H Smith. Its founding aim was stated to be to "encourage and bring international esteem to authors of the British Commonwealth"; originally open to all res ...

Outline

Based by the massacre of the inhabitants of

Oradour-sur-Glane Oradour-sur-Glane (; oc, Orador de Glana) was a commune in the Haute-Vienne department, New Aquitaine, west central France, as well as the name of the main village within the commune. History The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944 ...

and the subsequent memorialisation of the razed village, the novel recounts the return of a former German soldier, Ernst Kestner, a

Lübeck Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the stat ...

pork butcher dying of lung cancer, to the village of Lascaud-sur-Marn where he was quartered, where he fell in love, and where he participated in an unthinkable atrocity. Dealing with themes of guilt and reparation, and memory and its exploitation, the book centres less on the horror of war - which is by no means absent - than on the paradoxical nature of human relations. Kestner's attempts to expiate his remorse collide with his daughter's resistance to know on the one hand, and what one survivor, the local mayor and national deputy, has made of having his own personal history reduced to ashes from one day to the next. A short novel which eschews character development for paradoxical dialogue and plot twist, it is one of Hughes' most successful, having been filmed as ''Souvenir''. In his characterisations of Kestner, his daughter Louise, her husband Henri, and the deputy Lorion, Hughes also attempts to seize upon salient aspects of German and French character, sometimes more to the detriment of the latter than the former.

Outline

References

Further reading