THE LOCKMASTER

After the outbreak of water wars across all the world’s continents, access to freshwater streams and precious inland reservoirs becomes top priority for the planet’s fracturing assemblies of dissolving city- and nation-states. The narrator of Austrian writer Ransmayr’s enthralling short novel, a hydraulic engineer, sets off to build dams in Brazil, only to learn that his father, the Master of the Falls, responsible for manning the locks in their Central European hometown, has committed a horrible atrocity by flooding the channel, killing five people. A year later, the father disappears into the thundering falls aboard a rock-salt barge, and when the narrator attempts to unknot the tangle of his family, his own violent past muddles the telling. Ransmayr’s taut prose and unnerving plot are matched by a skillful penchant for folktale flourish. Mermaids lurk along coastlines of the narrator’s mother’s homeland on the Adriatic. His sister receives a diagnosis of brittle bone syndrome and must live like a glass fairy. The father, encaged by an obsession with a bygone past and prone to angry outbursts, proves to be the devil himself, for who else could “take on the form of a waterlily and the next instant become a buzzing dragonfly, a kingfisher, a bloodthirsty troll.” This is a foreboding vision of a not-so-distant future.

A compelling, darkly enchanted tale of desperation and dissolving family ties.