The pastoral novel—what a fraught concept. Today, our stories, like most of our population, live in the cities and suburbs, looking out over the hinterland with skepticism or even disdain. And no wonder: whenever our characters venture out from their climate-controlled interiors, they find decay and destruction, fallen-down farmhouses and overgrown fields, marshes full of plastic bottles, and woodlands cut clear to the forest floor. Every patch of ground, no matter how remote, threatens to remind us of the ways we’ve harmed our planet. The next time you climb a mountain, look up and see the contrails fading overhead. Wherever we go, there we are.
Every so-called “nature” novel must now contend with the ever-presence of humanity. So it is in The Son of Man, the new novel from Jean-Baptiste Del Amo. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne, it tells a familiar story with a mythic twist: early one spring morning, a father, mother, and son drive high up into the mountains to begin life anew on a rustic farmstead. The trek to Les Roches is arduous, disorganized. A tree blocks the road, forcing the pregnant woman and her young son to hike for miles up steep mountain trails. When they arrive at the house, the family finds it in disarray, with slates fallen from the roof and bare walls full of exposed insulation. Theirs will not be an idyllic retreat.
We never learn their names, and the whole story retains a certain archetypal quality. Del Amo is recapitulating Grand Narratives, the Struggle Against Nature, and so on. He begins with a prologue set in prehistoric times, describing in minute detail the living conditions and hunting methods of a strange, skin-clad tribe. Del Amo narrates their story in a loose present tense, mixing archaic words and technical terminology with lyrical phrases that seem to aim for profundity: a deer, for example, exhales white breath “as though he has just brought forth his soul.” Like most of this book, the technique is intermittently effective. For a short while, Del Amo does place these paleolithic lives on a plane with our own.
He intersperses the family’s struggle on the mountaintop with scenes set in the worn row house where the son and the mother used to live. Where once the prehistoric tribe wandered perilously across the landscape, their modern descendants remain stuck in a dead-end town, “trussed and tethered in the hollow of this valley, held in a vice by the mountain, doomed to their fate as the sons and daughters of laborers, warehousemen, welders, quarrymen, caretakers.” The father turns to crime, is sent to jail, and returns home only after his son has grown up. In the face of such persistent failures and frustrations, why not take a shot at Les Roches?
In its best moments, Son details the father’s attempt to rebuild his own father’s farmstead, a creaky, barely habitable building, constructed long ago to shelter animals during the summer months. This might sound romantic, but the reality is substantially less pleasant: a leaky roof he never fixes, a garden he can’t get to grow, dirty rooms lit at night by bare bulbs. The family members sleep on stained mattresses, eat canned food, and barely bathe. Never once do they seem at home.
When he wants to be, Del Amo is attentive to the textures of their survivalist life. Lost up in the “mysterious, disjointed temporality of the mountain,” the son starts to notice the seasons, the plants that flower and fruit, how mist clings to hollows and melts in summer sunshine. At his best, the writer grounds his scientific interests and somewhat extravagant prose in the specificity of the family’s encounter with the new mountain world. The boy hears “screech owls with their mysterious white faces that nest in the hollow of a dead tree.” His knowledge is both specific—the dead tree—and unreal: “mysterious.” In these moments, Del Amo manages to fuse in a single perspective his characters’ limited understanding with his own broader authorial knowledge. We are in their bodies but in his head.
All too often, however, he is frustratingly vague or distractingly grandiose. When the son places his hand against a tree trunk, “a tremor runs down his spine,” “as though, through his palm, he has absorbed something of this vegetal existence, as though the moss has imparted its essence, which, with the speed of a thunderbolt, has coursed through the complex network of muscles, sinews, and nerves of his arm to lodge at the base of his neck, from which it radiates.” Here Del Amo highlights the mundane materiality of the boy’s body, while speaking in abstractions about whatever he is actually feeling. So much of The Son of Man feels essentially hypothetical in this way, as if the author were describing a place he had only heard about, and never even seen in a photograph.
Del Amo has done a much better job of this before. His 2016 Animalia (also translated by Wynne) spans nearly a century in the life of a Pyrenean pig farm, a much larger subject that he manages to incarnate with a wealth of physical details, from the sensation of a sudden miscarriage to the winnowing away of a diseased body. In this earlier book, Del Amo rarely strains for profundity, because he has it right in front of him. In a memorable early scene, a fattened pig is slaughtered for the feast of All Saints. Del Amo describes this routine activity with visceral precision. The people in this novel are intimately familiar with a butchered body, so the vivid anatomical talk of broken cartilages and disarticulated bones and heads enucleated and boiled into paté does not feel at all out of place. The same goes for his descriptions of living bodies. He will describe a character as “glossy with lard.” He will describe a room as “fragrant with the smells of excrement, acrid smoke, metal and cooking.” All of The Son of Man added together cannot equal the intimacy achieved across just a few pages of Animalia.
Perhaps this is the consequence of Del Amo’s decision to write The Son of Man in a mythic key. But grand themes and lyric epiphanies are compatible with an attention to the specific. The Son of Man is set somewhere in the French south, a territory memorably mapped by the grand anti-modernist Jean Giono. Giono’s 1930 Harvest matches Del Amo’s book in its outlines: a lonely man named Panturle stakes a claim on a desolate bit of mountain property, which he aims to make bloom. As with most of Giono’s early characters, Panturle is as much a landscape as a man, “like a piece of wood walking along,” and he inhabits a place which Giono knew as if it were a member of his family. Giono also knew the value of a well-placed present-tense verb, setting his stories in places guided by ancient customs and timeless repetitions and patterns.
Yet Giono’s novels succeed in tethering the natural to the human and enacting the influence each has on the other. Panturle lives with all of his senses: after his first successful harvest, he experiences “a joy of which he wanted to savour all the smell and taste the juice as long as possible, like a sheep eating grass in the evening among the hills.” Even when the relationship between man and nature is catastrophic, there is never talk of a divorce. Yes, Giono lived in a very different time, when that kind of animal identification with the growing earth came more easily. But as Animalia demonstrates, the alienation between people and their environment is never total—a lesson Del Amo’s latest book seems to have altogether lost.
The Son of Man
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
Translated by Frank Wynne
Grove Atlantic
$26 | 240 pp.
