(Grove Press – July 16, 2024)
tr. Frank Wynne
Reading The Son of Man is like watching something awful unfold slowly, something awful but mostly well put together.
Immediately, maybe obviously, it puts me in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. A young boy at the forefront, violence, history, and dreams. We stay close to the boy in The Son of Man, who in the present action—mostly the late 1990s, as is confirmed by an eclipse three-quarters of the way through the novel—for the majority of the book, is nine. But TSOM is told in an eerie, almost timeless, present tense. A timelessness compounded because the novel opens with an italic dream scene of a prehistoric past. Twenty something pages of an ancient group, moving through landscape, sing-praying around a fire, hunting, the leader aging out. This introduction ends on the hunt. It ends with a doe killed, the youngest male hunter of the group having scared off a buck that was watching from a distance before the doe gets collected by the young hunter’s father and others, the young hunter feeling his loneliness in the forest.
It’s a conceit like the past is always happening, the reader is reading the past happening. It’s a mode like Fosse’s slow prose, but constructed much differently. There’s less immediate repetition. Del Amo’s prose hangs on every detail, details often repeating—land, weather, quality of light, smell, memory. And the details of the forested, wild, ancient scene grow its roots and reach out, hinting at the what’s to come.
The Son of Man is about a son, a mother and a father. They’re all unnamed. It is about violence and what is or can be passed down from one generation to the next. It may posit that which can be inherited doesn’t stop being passed down. Though what is passed down might mutate. There is hardship, innocence, choice, madness, sadness, hope overshadowed by fear, and there are fatal mistakes and escapes.
It’s a story that traces a cycle to its last concentric circle, the cycle set up in the intro—does the hunter remain the hunter or does he become the prey. Are these roles static? That kind of thing.
The mother had the son young, seventeen. The father was not quite ready to be a man. He stole cars, lived fast, did what he thought was taking time back from his difficult upbringing with his imposing, sad father at Les Roche, a crumbling property in the mountains. The father left the mother and son to escape threats connected with his crimes. The mother and the son, since the father left and after his return, despite his efforts, had an extremely close and intimate kind of relationship only a single mother and an only child could have. The son was around three then and the father returned when the son was nine. He returned to take the mother and the son to live at Les Roches. At Les Roches the reader sees the son start to fall in love with the land, learn that the mother is complicatedly pregnant, and the father’s violence is stained with madness.
It’s almost like the father wanted to rewrite history but fell into the traps that come with that—one where history repeats itself. And this trap shows up in different strata of their lives. The mother calls the son “her little red fox” and later the father tells the son a story of how the father’s father grew to hate a wild fox that started to become close to the father, almost domesticated, that the father’s father tried to exile the fox and ultimately killed it.
This viney entanglement of familial or generational history shows up again when the father warns the son of “a bogeyman that prowls by night, carrying off and devouring fool hardy children who linger in the mountains after the sun has set” to keep the son, on some level, safe from falling down mine shafts, safe from any danger of the woods at night—to ultimately keep the son close by. The father’s father had also tried to keep the father character from leaving by threatening to kill himself when the father wanted to leave, and did leave, Les Roches. Another fiction because the father never heard the gun go off when we left.
These doublings of action, story, and memory are like a sad and diabolical provincial rainy day fun fair. Fun house mirrors that distort and disguise the way out. It makes the reader feel stuck with inheritances and fate.
Just now, anything seems better than the excruciating agony that had her bedridden a day earlier, and perhaps she is prepared to believe one last time — before the madness of fathers, so long suppressed, this poison passed from generation to generation, and until now, hidden in the depths of the mountain and the hearts of men, falls upon Les Roches — the reconciliation is possible, that they will eventually find peace here, and from then on, everything will be serene.
The book explores most apparently the recent, somewhat overdone, buzzy theme of the violence passed down, but the book makes the theme feel bigger than other recent attempts. It lends the theme a new view, it eclipses it by just missing the beginning of the 21st century, which is refreshing. It’s specific in its timelessness. It lets the reader see these themes at a distance and allegorically because of the general namelessness of main characters. A reader might feel some sense of nostalgia as a reader, for a past where things could have been different.
The story traces that circle, the cycle set up in the intro. The story of the mother, the father, the son, the baby sister ends with images and action of the hunt.
Holding his sister close, the boy moves the beam of the torch over limestone concretions that extend from the top to the floor of the cave, where it plunges further into the secret forking depths. His eye is caught by curious marks on the flat grey wall. He steps closer and studies the remains of a cave painting depicting an animal with slender legs, its skull topped with intricately carved antlers that spread like roots; the best is being pursued by three human figures. Two are armed with spears, the third has none, but there is a dark line stuck into the creature’s flank.
The son cannot know that, since it was traced here with iron oxide and chalk in the dawn of time, no human eye has looked upon this painting. He stands, fascinated by this thing that has appeared in the beam of the flashlight; he can almost hear the clatter of hooves on hard ground and the breathless panting of men, feel the fear of the prey and the excitement of the hunters.
Does the hunter remain the hunter or does he become the prey. Are these roles static? Del Amo seems to say not always. The hunted might become the hunter to end the cycle. What new can now be passed down? What new is there to be passed down?
Nathan Dragon is a frequent contributor to NOON Annual. His work is also published in BLIMP, The Baffler, and New York Tyrant. He was a DiTrapano Foundation Resident (Fall 2023). His forthcoming short story collection, THE CHAMP IS HERE, will be available from C4G Books later this year. Along with Raegan Bird, he is the co-founder and editor of the publishing project Blue Arrangements.
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