Le Roi des aulnes Reading Order

Le Roi des aulnes (The Ogre, 1970) by Michel Tournier won the Prix Goncourt unanimously — the first time in the award's history that all members of the jury voted for the same book — and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Abel Tiffauges, the narrator, is a large, clumsy Parisian garage mechanic who believes he has been marked out by destiny for a special role. He keeps a private diary (in 'sinister writings') in which he records his theory of phoria — the carrying of one being by another — and his complex relationship to children: he is drawn to them, not sexually but with a protective, possessive desire to carry them, to serve them. When the Second World War begins, Tiffauges is captured by the Germans and taken to East Prussia, where he is put to work on a Junker estate and later at a recruitment station for the Napola (the Nazi elite schools). His role, gradually, becomes the recruiting of children for the Nazi system — the 'phoria', the carrying of children, has been pressed into the service of a monstrous system. The novel is an extraordinary meditation on the way innocent drives can be recruited by evil — how a man who genuinely loves children can participate in a system that destroys them — and on the relationship between myth (the Erl-King, or 'Roi des aulnes', of Goethe's poem) and historical catastrophe. Le Roi des aulnes is one of the most disturbing and morally serious novels of the twentieth century.