In John Berger's powerful novel King, the Terrain is also home to a small community of the dispossessed. Here, a stone's throw from a highway somewhere in France, in shelters constructed out of detritus, live Jack and Marcello, old Corinna and Liberto, Joachim and Anna, and Danny and Saul. Here also live Vica and Vico, an elderly couple (and couples are a rarity among the homeless) and their dog, King. It is King who narrates this day-in-the-life narrative, and Berger has endowed him with the ability to understand and be understood: "Lying beside the chestnut brazier, something came to me between the ears: the world is so bad, God has to exist. I asked Vico what he thought. 'Most people,' he said quickly, 'would draw the opposite conclusion.'"

What makes King such a singular creation is that despite his philosophical bent and communicative skills, there is nothing anthropomorphic about him. He thinks, behaves, and reacts like a dog, albeit a dog who ponders the existence of the Almighty. Animals are not sentimental, and neither is Berger. His human characters are irrevocably damaged, their lives verge on the unbearable, and their attempts to create family and community at the edges of society are eventually thwarted. There can be no happy ending to this street story, but Berger is after something bigger than making his readers feel good. Instead he shines a spotlight on a world we would prefer to ignore, using the love that Vica, Vico, and King feel for each other to illuminate a humanity that is all too often overlooked. King is not an easy book to read, but it is impossible to forget. --Alix Wilber

Product Description
With the poetic acuity that renders his work timeless, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us a 24-hour chronicle of homelessness. Beside a highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a vagrant community of once-hopeful individuals, now abandoned by the twentieth century.

King, our narrator, is the guardian of a homeless couple, stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh. His canine sensibility affords him both amnesty from human hardship and rare insight into his companions' lives.Through his senses we see--clearly and unsentimentally--the dignity and strength that can survive within chaos and pain.

Why does Berger, that in his last books criticized with such a distant look the urban and capitalist way of life, take this "dog" and lets him sign a book about a couple of homeless that live the rest of their lifes in a city, a "desert of souls"? It may seem like he is living in a city like this for a lot of years and full of watching his life being drained he decided just to release a book that has a critic point of view about it. But if you know Berger's work you will know that this is his most isolated, exhilated, distant and critic book about capitalism, the deception of the urban dream and the globalisation. In fact, Berger has a strong influence of lots of other authors like Giambattista Vico (the name of the main carachter is Vico, the name of the great italian philosopher that, like a prophet, said that every civilisation had to pass through four stages and the last one - il ricorso - is in fact the one we are living in, the AGE OF DOGS), Marx, Pascal and Beckett (a strong influence in most of his works and specially in this one we can find some great similarities).

Resuming, KING is a book to read when a person is feeling good. Like Berger (or King) says: "To read a man needs to love himself, not much but a little."

King is a pearl and like Goethe said: "A well trained dog is worth the respect of the most wise man" and Mr. Berger has trained him well.

I recomend it.

PEDRO ALVEs


A Person Could Not   February 9, 2001
 15 out of 17 found this review helpful

Mr. Berger uses man's best friend to describe the human existence of the homeless. The 24 hours of experiences the canine "King" relates, had to be told by an animal other than a human, it could not otherwise work. Man as an animal shares many commonalities with the rest of the animal kingdom. As time passes skills we thought unique to ourselves are becoming fewer, I would offer speech as an example. One only has to read of the care that Elephants treat their dead and dying, the ways they revisit their dead to understand that compassion too is something we have yet to master.

We can claim something that is unique to our group. We kill our own, we torture our own, we systematically exterminate and ethnically cleanse our own. And as King relates to us we lack the compassion for those we would prefer to ignore rather than to help. There is a moment when the act of dousing a sleeping man with gasoline and lighting him afire is described as the death of a heretic. King muses the heretic's crime, could it be he is poor?

This book can be easily dismissed as being nothing new and that perhaps is the point. We have become a group that is nearly impossible to shock, the youngest of our group now kill aimlessly, and older members kill the youngest with no more concern than swatting a insect. Those with power persecute the weak; it has become all but a sport.

Mr. Berger's book is important because it shows behavior that should be contemptible, but has become so common, so cliche, it is rarely even contemplated. He needed to use a dog to bring attention to a human problem because a person is not qualified to comment on how we behave.

An important book by a talented man who has lived a long life, and clearly is less than impressed with what he has seen.


This is a beautiful book   January 4, 2000
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Prose that is poetry. A must for any fan of John Berger. And for readers that don't know his work it should be a revelation. An extraordinary, moving, and passionately empathetic book.


King is the word   November 27, 1999
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

King was published in the UK without John Berger's name on the cover. You only found it on the copyright page and on the endpaper at the back. This is a typically self-effacing move by a writer who is far more interested in telling stories than promoting himself. King takes us further into the zones of the dispossessed than Berger has gone before, even in his stunning trilogy Into Their Labours. A bunch of people live on a patch of urban wasteland; the narrator, King, is a dog who talks, or possibly a man who behaves like (maybe even appears as, maybe even is) a dog. They scrounge what little money and comfort they can get, always keeping an eye out for the authorities. Berger has never ceased to write about the people most writers neither know nor care about; his voice (or rather voices), his authority and his compassion are unique. And it's maybe the best book ever written with a dog as narrator, too.


Another Wonder from Berger   June 2, 1999
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

John Berger has always been on the cutting edge of language and ideas. He is a sort of exile from all the terminal hipness of literature. He is brave and provocative and he continually questions the order of things. He writes from a deep inner need, in order to say things all over again, as if they have never been told before. This novel, King, is a marvellous movement on from his novel "To the Wedding." It reads as a contemporary myth but I never once doubt the authenticity of voice -- which is strange, since the book is ostensibly narrated by a dog. Berger is in top form. Read this fiercely important book.