BOOK REVIEW: Filtered largely through the perspective of a young boy, The Son of Man is a brooding, brutal pastoral from the French author of Animalia, the prizewinning bleak epic. The boy’s father returns to his partner and child after a long absence. Soon, they are journeying deep into the countryside to the father’s remote, derelict family home. The father, mother and child are not named in the story, and acquire an archetypal and primal significance as each acts out an almost inevitable role in an unfolding tragedy. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, says Tolstoy, but this book seems to suggest the opposite: unhappiness is an undifferentiated current that sweeps the novel’s characters along.
Simmering with sex and violence, The Son of Man is a descendant of the French Naturalism tradition, whose most influential exponent was the 19th-century novelist Émile Zola. In Zola’s novels, the characters have scarcely more agency than the animals in their fields; how they act – which is generally badly – is determined by instinct, the play of natural forces over which they have little control.
In Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s novel, the boy lacks agency because of his youth, and his mother because she is a woman in a relentlessly patriarchal world. But the father, even though he exerts his tyrannical will over mother and child, is also trapped. Just out of prison and bottom-of-the-heap poor, his only plan – that is, his only option – is to return with his family to the long-deserted country house where he himself was raised by an abusive father. Violence is a gift handed down the generations from father to son, and when the son finds a handgun in one of the outbuildings, it’s sure as Chekhov that that gun will go off before the novel ends.
There are just the three characters peopling the book, unless you count the appearance, in a momentary flashback, of a fairground rides operator and the boy’s grandmother, or the shadowy Uncle Tony, the only named character. The woman turns out to be pregnant: is the baby Tony’s? Her partner thinks so, and his anger builds and builds. Meanwhile, the woman escapes into her stack of romance novels, which are as distant from her life as it’s possible to be.
Del Amo has been praised for the precision and vividness of his writing, and he’s very good at evoking an oppressive atmosphere and male aggression. The boy’s limited understanding of what is happening between the two adults adds to the tension, but at times this perspective wobbles.
For example, at the beginning of the book when the boy first sees his father, he observes that the man must have just had a haircut because he “can see a dusting of hair clippings on his throat and the exposed section of his trapezius muscles”. Maybe we can accept “trapezius muscles” as the narrative supplying the anatomical term for what the child sees: it’s told in the third-person, after all. But then the boy breathes “in his smell of tobacco, damp leather and cheap aftershave”. Can we believe even for a second that any boy could distinguish a cheap aftershave?
It’s a minor lapse but not a unique example, and it jolts us out of the child’s perception. Such lapses break what is otherwise a powerful spell.
Del Amo has stripped his book of many of the novel’s traditional accoutrements: it has few characters, sparse dialogue, one setting and only the bare bones of a plot. What is there is inexorable, bleak and ugly, but it’s hard to look away.
The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Text, $40) is out now.
