Child of God

Child of God, by Cormac Mccarthey

A bizarre and disturbing novel, nevertheless rendered with Mccarthey's signature stark beauty and poetic detail. The story follows Lester Ballard, a backwoods degenerate of the deep south, who exiled from his community roams the countryside of Tennessee. On his pilgrimage he indulges his warped appetite for murder and necrophilia, and the periodic scenes are truly horrifying:

She lay there naked on the mattress with her sallow breasts pooled in the light like wax flowers. Ballard began to dress her in her new clothes. He sat and brushed her hair [...] [and [ began to paint her lips [...] He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers [...] and spread her loose thighs. You’ve been wanting this, he told her. 

It is possible to spot precipitant signs of future works; the phantasmagoric landscapes of Blood Meridian and the Road replete with its grotesque characters, only here, it is localized. The language is vivid, eidetic and natural. It contains a sensual quality, which lures us in, and make us accomplices to the protagonist, creating a disturbing read.

However, the problem with the novel is that, despite the beauty of the style, it lacks content and substance. Nothing really happens within the narrative, and so little meaning can be salvaged from it. Some readers will vaunt the work as an unflinching study of human degradation and claim that it asks penetrating questions as to how we treat exiles, and what stories we use to justify our acts. I for one don’t buy this, because the characters seem lifeless. Lester Ballard, ‘with eyes, dark, huge and vacant’ is a cipher, and possesses no internal reality to account for his behaviour, other than the novelty appearance of a walking freak-show. His actions, while macabre seem purposelessly, lacking motivation or meaning, and this makes them insignificant and unreal. The wider intellectual themes are also nonexistent, and wholly out of keeping with Mccarthey’s method anyway. Instead we have a tapestry of images rather than a story.

Despite this there is a certain pleasure in reading Mccarthey. His novels are dreamscapes in which the ordinary world is transfigured. This narrative is no different, and thus it is not the character of Lester Ballard who truly scares us but the alien and hostile land he inhabits. Unlike Kafka’s world, there is no mystery or reality of which the protagonist is excluded from. Instead, the world is merely violent and dangerous, and this reflected in the souls of men. The story ends in the subterranean caves beneath Tennessee:

Down narrow dripping corridors, across stone rooms, where fragile spires stood [...] and a stream in its stone bed ran on in the sightless dark.

 Ballard’s and Mccarthey’s down-going journey, has finally led the reader to the depths in more ways than one.