As well as the clear overview these statistics give, in their bare facticity they are redolent of the chillingly sublimated angst often involved in so much of this pain and suffering. Life is messy, our emotions can be wild. Too many women are forced to live in constant terror, while often the blokes who perpetrate the violence complain about feeling boxed in, left out or manipulated by forces beyond their control. The hard work that goes into providing the statistics by organisations such as Counting Dead Women Australia can offer hope to women that eventually a sense of justice may prevail – how can any society ignore such information? – but to some men these same statistics are merely manifestations of the dispiriting modern bureaucracies they’re trying to break free from, as if everything they understand to be important in life is reduced to cold categories and numbers.
Award-winning author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo has published five novels in his native France. The drama of his new book, The Son of Man – his second work to be translated into English – is largely driven by a character who fits perfectly this male demographic of the boxed in and left out. The book is set in roughly present-day rural France, where a single working-class mother and her nine-year-old son have their lives upended by the unannounced return of the son’s father, after what appears to be a crime-related absence. From the outset his return to the family is simmering with thwarted pride and physical threat.
While the father’s social milieu is muscle cars and weekend hunting, the mother – all family members are named only by their relative status – is depicted as a reader of Mills & Boon-style romances who is fatally attracted to the father of her boy and prepared to allow him to reassume his role in the family. The initially unspoken reality is that she feels she doesn’t have a choice. Nor does the son, who is subjected to the father’s turgid soliloquies about how women are peripheral to the pact that brings pride and nobility to a family, the sacred contract that must exist between a father and son. Inevitably, of course, it is a contract that the father’s own father was unable to fulfil.
While the literary novel is not a sociological form per se, it can, as Del Amo’s forebear Balzac demonstrated as far back as the 19th century, embody the sentimental realities of our social mechanisms in ways statistics never can. Del Amo’s previous translated work, Animalia, remorselessly depicted the realities of farming life in the Tarn-et-Garonne region of southern central France, in writing reminiscent and, at times, as preternaturally powerful as any in Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner. However, it was also a novel in which the characters eventually came to function not so much as relatable inhabitants of a human life-world but as agents of their author’s urgent desire to document his culture’s descent into the automated brutality of industrialised factory farming. Thus the Old Testament inflections in Del Amo’s style, in which all farmers are somehow necessarily the successors of Job, became entangled with technological modernity’s suicidal abstraction from the biota that sustains us.
This was potent stuff. Here Del Amo again coopts tropes from American Gothic to depict the descent of the genetic triangulation of The Son of Man into an infranatural hell. Condemned to attempt a redemption of his own flawed paternal inheritance, the father has a vision for the family that will transcend the common ruck of suburban wage slavery by returning them to the remote house of his childhood in the mountains. We follow the family as they make their way, eventually on foot, towards his long-deceased father’s dilapidated hulk of a building, still standing but in need of repair.
We gradually discover a narrative then in which the unfolding tragedies call time on the doomed perpetuation of apex male independence. As in Animalia, Del Amo portrays this heavily gendered disaster as yet one more node in a cycle of generational violence determined by the masculine battle to wrench freedom from largely inscrutable physical habitats. Women – in this case the now heavily pregnant mother – become the recessive and brutalised screens upon which an atavistic horror show is projected.
There is a biological fatalism to Del Amo’s novels that eschews all metaphysics and any sense of hope that things can be turned around. That’s fair enough: it is not fiction’s job to bring good news. As an exponent of yet another approach to the Anthropocene novel, his characters are ensnared in broad elemental processes more profound than individual or ideological agency. With a writer of such punch, this perspective can seem as incontrovertible as it is melodramatically amoral. Ultimately his point is, I suppose, that we should stop kidding ourselves. We are neither noble nor enlightened – we are terrifyingly vulnerable animals whose war on natural processes has rendered us the most brutal and self-deluded species of all. It seems Del Amo’s literary project is to smash that self-delusion to smithereens.
Text Publishing, 224pp, $34.99
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