Review: Child of God

McCARTHY, Cormac, Child Of God, Picador/Pan Macmillan, London, 2011.

Octavo; paperback; 186pp. Minor wear; a small surface tear to the back cover. Very good.

I would like to introduce you to Lester Ballard. Some of you might have met him already, but for those who haven’t, he will come like a revelation to you. Be warned: he’s not a particularly nice fellow. In fact, having met him, you might well wish you hadn’t. I wouldn’t blame you.

This novel by Cormac MacCarthy is all about Lester and his personal woes. Lester went into gaol for a short spell and, when he emerged, he discovered that he’d been dispossessed. The county resumed ownership of his family land and home and put it up for auction. Despite showing up at the sale, armed and ready to defend his ancestral territory, Lester gets run off by the Sherriff. This is the start of his trouble…

What can I say about McCarthy’s writing that hasn’t already been said a thousand times? It’s shockingly good. There’s not a word out of place. He conjures the East Tennessee hill country with an effortless beauty and economy. During the course of the tale, the seasons swing around in their stated course and you can actually feel the world shifting about you in the prose. The wildlife; the trees and plants; the muggy heat of summer and the bitter bite of winter – it surrounds you as you navigate the text. It’s like stepping into another world, and one that the author knows intimately.

Not only this, McCarthy infuses the narrative with the vernacular of the local tribes. Each character comes alive off the page, a living and breathing representative of the community. The local patois literally twangs in your ears as you read it. There’s not a bum note in any of it. As many have said so often before me, the language is tough, and lean, and incredibly beautiful.

And then, there’s the horror.

Lester, having lost everything, goes Bush (as we say here in Australia). He finds a deserted farmhouse in a back wood and settles in to establish himself. He scrounges food and supplies, scraping together enough cash and tradeable material to keep himself in ammunition – his only notable achievement in life is that he is a dead shot. He makes friends with the local junkyard overseer, whose bevy of girl children are all named after afflictions drawn from an old medical dictionary, and he keeps a weather-eye out for the Sherriff, who has Lester firmly in his sights as a potential bad egg. A good judge of character is the Sherriff.

One cold evening, Lester discovers a parked car on a side road near one of his trails and, inside it, two dead people, killed by exhaust fumes while embroiled in youthful passion. Lester steals their cash and anything else of use to him and then carries off the dead girl to his ruined clapboard hideaway. There, he alleviates his own thwarted passions, and stores her corpse in the attic for later.

Yes. Lester Ballard is a young man of strange lusts.

It would be easy to simply dismiss Lester as a twisted sum’bitch and be done with it. However, in McCarthy’s masterful hands, we are simultaneously shocked by Lester’s actions, and brought to a clear knowledge of why he is this way. Throughout the book we come to understand Lester and the things he does; not to accept, or agree with them – that would be horrible – but a steady empathy emerges from the text. We can see exactly where he’s coming from.

Unfortunately, Lester suffers a set-back and loses his new girlfriend and his rickety home. With a dire winter approaching, he re-locates to a new home in a series of limestone caves and settles in. Then he goes and shoots himself a couple of new girlfriends.

The whole story rolls onwards to a remarkable, but inevitable, conclusion. Lester is no Hannibal Lecter; he’s not very smart – cunning, definitely, but not smart – and he has no control over his temper. He eludes capture; gets caught and escapes; and keeps on doing the same things over and over again. When the final reckoning happens, even he is resigned to it, and goes to his fate, not willingly, but with the knowledge that there is no alternative.

In the final analysis, we see Lester as not an aberration of his community, but as a somehow natural consequence of it: the ignorance, poverty and prejudice of the East Tennessee townships created Lester Ballard, as surely as the rain created the limestone caves beneath the forested hills.

What has been read cannot be un-read; this is a bell that can’t be un-rung. Once you finish this book it will stay with you forever. That’s not only because of the terrible, terrible things which take place between its covers, but because it’s also wrapped up in some of the most beautiful writing you will ever come across. There’s awfulness and laugh-out-loud humour, along with an incredibly wonderful scene in a blacksmith’s workshop where Lester gets his axe sharpened. Amazingly, and because it’s McCarthy’s point, none of it is out of place or wrong – it’s an incredible, complex and daunting piece of work, complete and whole, in and of itself.

Five Tentacled Horrors from me.