‘The Son of Man’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (2021) – 232 pages Translated from the French by Frank Wynne
We begin in prehistoric times. A group, a pack, of humans is trudging through the cold forests of presumably northern France.
“For days now, they have been marching westward into the bitter autumn wind. Thick unkempt beards erode the hard features of the men. Ruddy-faced women carry newborns in tattered pelts. Many will die along the way, from the blue bitter cold or from dysentery contracted from stagnant watering holes where the feral herds come to drink. For them the men will dig desolate hollows in the earth. ”
These were grim times for the human animals. While the women spent all their time and effort trying to keep their babies and little children alive, the men murdered animals with their spears for food and built some kind of makeshift shelters to keep them from the bitter cold.
And then ‘The Son of Man’ suddenly switches to modern times, a modern family.
What has caused humans, especially the males of the species, to be so brutal, even today? Inescapably, the answer lies in our brutal primordial past.
Humans are the only species who regularly murder members of their own kind in wars.
‘The Son of Man’ depicts modern-day domestic brutality, the father and the mother and the nine year-old son. The characters do not have names.
The father comes back to his wife and son after being gone for several years for some unexplained reason. He takes them out of the city to his childhood home, Les Roches, so they can start again as a family. But always there is this undercurrent of anger and pent-up violence.
The mother says to the father:
“I just wish you could get past this rage, this shadow constantly hanging over you.”
We see this father and this mother through the eyes of their boy. The boy realizes he must protect his mother from the father’s onslaught.
The story in ‘The Son of Man’ will stay with me for a long time. Here we have modern-day family violence, but its roots are in the prehistoric past. Man’s brutality has been passed down through the ages from primordial times, and none of us are exempt.
I am also excited to soon read the previous novel, ‘Animalia’, by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, since ‘The Son of Man’ has such depth.
Grade: A
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on October 15, 2024 at 5:11 PM
Hi Tony! I think I read about this one soon after it was published. It seemed interesting but — you know how such things go! I’m not quite in the mood for something so brutal just yet (I’m still in hurricane survival mode — I live in west coast Florida) but I’ll keep it in mind.
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Posted by Anokatony on October 15, 2024 at 5:22 PM
Hi Janakay,
Yes, Milton, we heard about that. We don’t get hurricanes up here in Minnesota, just an occasional tornado.
I liked the way ‘Son of Man’ tied modern day human behavior to our savage past. This has become one of my favorite books of the year.
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Posted by Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on October 15, 2024 at 5:39 PM
Do you have any plans to read Kushner’s Creation Lake? There’s a prominent story arc, told mostly by email, regarding Neanderthal man, a species that is favorable contrasted to modern Homo sapiens! It was an interesting portion of an interesting book, although I’m not quite sure what to make of it. My point, really, is how these themes (modern man’s behavior rooted/contrasted with the primitive) seem to pop up at the same time!
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Posted by Anokatony on October 15, 2024 at 5:42 PM
I’m considering ‘Creation Lake’, but having just completed two rather long books, ‘The Empusium’ and ‘Playground’, I’m looking for something a little shorter for now. I do not recommend ‘The Empusium’ by the way, but you will read my review later.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on October 16, 2024 at 2:46 AM
The publisher persuaded me to take a copy of this, and it sat on my table for ages and ages… but, like Jana, over and over again, I was not in the mood for something so brutal and I finally decided this week that I was not going to read it and out it went.
But from reading your review, I have a question, (not an accusation against the author): isn’t it a bit of a copout to say that the roots are in the inescapable prehistoric past? It’s in my genes so I can’t help it? Or have I misunderstood something?
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Posted by Anokatony on October 16, 2024 at 4:48 AM
Hi Lisa,
Neither the author or the main father character use this prehistoric past to excuse their behavior. The author is presenting these prehistoric conditions as an inescapable fact. Humans lived more like animals then, and the males developed violent traits just to survive.
The father’s behavior is so terrible, it is inexcusable. The author is presenting a prehistoric reason why these things happen.
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Posted by Lisa Hill on October 16, 2024 at 7:26 AM
Hmm, it’s not an idea that I like, and there are so many non-violent men in my life that I have trouble being convinced of it.
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Posted by Anokatony on October 16, 2024 at 7:49 AM
How about World War I and World War II and the possibility of World War III ?
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Posted by Lisa Hill on October 16, 2024 at 9:40 AM
Well of course, but some of the people ordered to fight in it were gentle souls.
Besides, women fight in wars too, and they support them.
All I’m saying is that I don’t believe there is a natural instinct towards violence. Don’t they say that the reason man prospered in prehistoric times is because they cooperated together in groups? And still do today, violence is an aberration, that’s why it gets reported in the news.
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Posted by Anokatony on October 16, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Yes, there are civilizing instincts, but somehow the deeply ingrained instinct toward violence just won’t go away. I am not much of a believer in human progress. One only needs to look at Germany during World War II.
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Posted by My Favorite Fiction I Have Read in 2024 | Tony's Book World on December 10, 2024 at 5:36 PM
[…] ‘The Son of Man’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (2021) – This novel is built around a quite simple but profound premise. The human animal has struggled to survive for two million years. That long, long struggle to survive has shaped the human animals of today, not always in good ways. This is the kind of profundity that is rarely found in literature anymore. […]
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