Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel, The Son of Man, opens with a promise. It introduces a context for human experience that places humanity within a continuum that stretches back millions of years, and within an ecology in which our species is far from the centre. But quickly, this promise evolves into something unexpected. While Del Amo’s forensic prose style works to decentre and estrange the human experience, the family at The Son of Man’s core firmly re-grounds the novel in a familiar, all-too-human drama. The drama is contemporary, yet fundamental – the burden of a son trying to understand his difficult, authoritarian father. It is so fundamental as to form a kind of anthropological abstract, a kind of basic human story that could be applied as easily to Neanderthals as to us. In this sense, the obsessive precision of Del Amo’s prose does less to paint our species as another animal, an integrated part of a wider ecosystem, as it does to portray us as a species bound to predictable human melodrama. Whereas other novels have decentred the human by placing us within our ecological context (as in The Overstory by Richard Powers), The Son of Man works to remind us that to resist the personal, as Del Amo achieves, is not to transcend the human. As an exercise in naturalism, Del Amo rarely attempts to rise above the basic human myths that we recognise not from nature or experience but from the history of narrative fiction. And perhaps this is the point. The Son of Man is not the story of a real human family, seen in naturalistic detail as if under a microscope, but a story of archetypes that subtly reflects upon our species as storytellers, not as animals. If the human experience is decentred within the novel it is not replaced by a biological core but by a myth of humanity which has informed the stories we tell about ourselves for thousands of years. It is not a hopeful story. It is not, by definition, an original story. It is rather a story which the reader could imagine stumbling across on the walls of a Palaeolithic cave – a story which, no matter how we develop as a species, will be told again and again and again.
About the reviewer
Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely, and have won numerous awards including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People was published by Parthian Books in June 2023.
No comments:
Post a Comment