Something inside the boy crumbles, a hesitancy, a fear, and he surrenders to the car’s movements, surreptitiously seeks to make contact with the father, to touch him through the leather jacket in a tentative, clumsy attempt to convey his affection — or what he considers the affection expected of a son for his father, of a child for this man, this stranger who, out of the blue, has been designated his father.
I read The Son of Man in a new English translation (the French original was released in 2021), and while author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo has much to say about the universal human condition (and in particular, the relationships between fathers and sons going back to the dawn of man), I found there was something slightly lost in translation between this story set in recentish (it seems before cell phones and internet) rural France and where I find myself today. Still: I found myself very invested in the modern day timeline (whose heart wouldn’t go out to a nine year old boy meeting his dangerous father for the first time?), and while I didn’t find the plot to be exactly surprising, I thought that the storytelling was very compelling and flowed logically to prove the point that Del Amo appeared to be making about what fathers can’t help but pass down to their sons. This touched me, heart and mind, and I can’t ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages might not be in their final forms.)
The leader stops, looks up at the sky and, for an instant, the black disc of his pupil aligns with the white disc of the sun, the star sears the retina and the creature crawling through the matricial mud turns away to contemplate the valley through which he is trudging with others of his kind: a landscape whipped by winds, sparse undergrowth dotted here and there with shrubs that have a mournful air; over this bleak terrain floats the negative afterimage of the day star, a black moon suspended on the horizon.
This opening paragraph — and the scene that follows, with a group of primitive hunters (including a father and adolescent son with “eyes that are deeply sunken in sockets chiselled beneath the prominent brow ridge”) on a deer hunt — made me think, “Whoa, I didn’t know I was reading a book set in prehistory.” But after a deer is taken, the narrative goes from “The young hunter bends down and picks up his spear” and shifts, within a paragraph, to: “In the backseat of the battered old estate car, the son is dozing.” Del Amo plays with the timeline throughout — we first meet this family (father, mother, and son) as they drive towards some unnamed destination, and then rewind to the father suddenly (creepily) inserting himself into the mother and son’s happy lives — and it takes the entire novel of shifting around in the timeline to answer all of the questions that this setup presents. This format was really well done.
As it turns out, this reunited family is making their way towards the incredibly remote mountain property named Les Roches (which sounds impressive but it’s a dilapidated barn conversion) where the father was raised by his own possessive, grief-ridden, paranoid single father; and as the trio tramps up the mountain at night, overburdened with the backpacks the man has assigned to them, the questions keep coming, and Del Amo eventually answers them all. This is, at heart, a story of a nearly feral, antisocial man who suddenly decides to assert parental rights over a sensitive boy who had been raised by a very young, well-meaning, loving single mother; and not only does Del Amo demonstrate how the father’s worst traits were learned from his own father, but situations between the father and son chime right back to the dawn of man (including the solar eclipse described in that last passage.) The theme is impressively supported by the plot.
A note on the translation: there was a weird formality to some of the language that sometimes made me wonder if the translator (Frank Wynne) was really capturing the sense, instead of the literal translation, of Del Amo’s writing; would a reader of the original have needed to look up definitions as they encountered that original primitive band of people described as a “tatterdemalion herd”, or when “the tarpaulin inflates and crumples with the rustle of an elytron”, or perhaps most egregiously, “The crabbed flesh of her genetrix was always forced into severe skirts that never came above her knee.” (That last can almost be forgiven because, as Del Amo never gives formal names to his characters, there are only so many ways to say “the woman” or “the mother”, but an English writer would never use “genetrix”.) I found it distracting.
There are other stars, he says, other planets, some so dark that no sun ever reaches them, and beyond that, there are other galaxies, thousands of them, and each galaxy contains billions of suns, billions of planets, and beyond everything that is visible, he says, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
“Are there other earths like ours?”
“I hope not,” says the father after a prolonged silence. “I hope there’s nothing. Nothing but rock, silence, ice and fire.”
There’s a lot of pain and drama in this story, but it doesn’t come from nowhere; Del Amo held my attention throughout and totally nailed the landing. Recommended!
