The Pork Butcher is a novel by English writer David Hughes, first published in 1984 by Constable & Co, and winner of the 1985 WH Smith Literary Award.
Based by the massacre of the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane and the subsequent memorialisation of the razed village, the novel recounts the return of a former German soldier, Ernst Kestner, a Lübeck 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.
"Kestner looked pleasantly across the spaces of the bare stone floors. (...) In his gaze, as the story developed, lay an ingenuous hope that at the last minute, when things became too much, he could personally step into the action as a redeeming hero and by lying, by editing, and by taking control, divert the truth from the unspeakable conclusion of the tale. So often at home, in the tram, chopping up meat, lying in bed next to a wife, he had done just that: permitted fantasy, in the nick of time, to keep him sane, to give him hope of a tolerable tomorrow." (p 59)
"I came back home to find what you had left", Lorion said. "The place was still alive, but only because the fires you started took days to die down. The corpses were so black as to have no human relevance. They inspired not feeling, not even rage - but determination. (...) I thought only that history had made one of those rare wonderful mistakes, so offensive to the hearts of our people that history could never be the same or as bad again." (p 100)