Review by Joe Bedford of "The Son of Man" by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

 

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.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "The Empusium" by Olga Tokarczuk

A horror story – not my usual thing.

Olga Tokarczuk – I have heard of her but never read her work.

A nod to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain – a novel I’ve not read.

Empusium – I could not find a definition.

The story begins in September 1913. We meet a young Pole, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, who is suffering from tuberculosis as he arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf. 

This is a health resort in the Silesian mountains. We meet the staff. We see the beautifully described landscape. The director's wife commits suicide. Life goes on as normal.

Each night the residents of the resort meet to take a hallucinogenic local liqueur and we read their conversations as they interact. Together they discuss the great issues of the day: should there be a Monarchy or should democracy prevail? Do devils exist? We are asked if women are born inferior? Must there be war, how do we find  peace? 

The residents' place in the novel seems ambivalent. But they decide that the female brain is smaller than a male's; that women are delicate and sensitive, and impulsive. They find that women are at an earlier stage of human evolution and that because women are socially challenged, they must always rely on men. 

Misogynistically, they decide that the female body belongs not to individual women, but to humankind in general. They affirm that nature having endowed men with fertility, nature didn’t give the female the ability to control it. 

It is painful to read these views. Despite this, Tokarczuk assures her readers that all the misogynist passages in Empusium are taken from writings including such as St Augustine, Conrad, Darwin, Freud, Hesiod, Lawrence, Milton, Nietzsche, Plato, Racine, Shakespeare, Swift, Wagner, and Yeats. The residents of Herr Opitz’s guesthouse are obsessed with patriarchal ideas. To them, patriarchy is the natural order.

How does this all impact on the story that flows from these people? You will need to read the novel to find out!

Tokarczuk tells us that, as life goes on in the sanatorium, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding forest and hills. There seems to be someone, or something, watching them, attempting to penetrate their sheltered world. As Wojnicz tries to unravel the truth and the malevolent forces outside the guesthouse, fate has already chosen the next target.

What is Empusium? Tokarczuk has come up with her own definition, melding together roots Empousa and symposion. But who, or what, is the Empousa? I quote from Samuel Tchorek-Bentall: "In the comedies of the playwright Aristophanes, she is described as an enormous shapeshifting beast, a bull at one moment, then a mule, then a beautiful woman, then a bitch. Her entire face is on fire, one of her legs is made of bronze, the other of cow dung. Meanwhile, in the third-century Life of Apollonius of Tyana, she makes an appearance as a man-eating spectre, a being 'little affected by the passion of love,' fond of nothing but male flesh."

Need I say more?

This is an amazing book, mysterious and exciting. We have to read on to learn the outcome: it is as if we are taken over by the threatening forces in the book, compelled to turn the next page, to discover who the evil spirits actually are. 

Obviously, Tokarczuk doesn’t take the misogynistic beliefs of her characters seriously. Consequently, the best parts of the novel are not the rather self-indulgent dronings of the patients, but the signs of malevolence that keep appearing: the slimy toad, the headless duck, the mystical female figures created from moss, sticks, fir needles, rotten wood, and other organic materials, which the perverse coalmen use. 

The Empusium is not an easy read, but it is astutely written. The style is old fashioned, but this matches its setting in the 1910s, and adds to the intensity of the tale. Who or what is the malignancy that threatens? Who will survive to tell the tale? It is intoxicating.

A horror story – perhaps I should read more.

Olga Tokarczuk – I need to read more of her work.

A nod to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain – I must read it.

Empusium - a sexist symposium that Tokarczuk dubs an empuzjon, a neologism derived from the Greek Empousa and modelled, incorrectly from a strictly philological point of view, on symposion, the Greek word for "banquet."

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 68. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot!