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The Son of Man - Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (2021)

Stanley Kubrik was a filmmaker who knew a thing or two about man’s predilection for a bit of the ultraviolence. His sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of hominid apes in the veld being driven away from its water hole by a rival tribe. After stumbling across an alien monolith, the tribe learn how to use a bone as a weapon and, after their first hunt, return to drive their rivals away with it. The story then jump cuts forward a couple of million years, and we encounter Dave the astronaut in a deep space death struggle with HAL 9000 the obdurate, artificially intelligent, supercomputer.

In a similar vein, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s “The Son of Man” foregrounds his story with a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherer humans traipsing through the landscape. The men hunt, fish, have sex with their partner, and bury their dead; while the women's lot is to serve as wombs and child rearers. Del Amo then flips to a present-day French family – a father, a mother, and their son – on a journey. They’re heading to the father’s old house in the mountains of Les Roches to spend the summer. But this is no holiday: through flashbacks we begin to get the full, ugly picture, all told in visceral, physical prose. The mother lives on romance novels, beer and painkillers; the supplies packed by the father include cigarettes and a revolver. (The way he devours a chicken carcass will put you off poultry for life.) The father’s unpredictability reflects his experience with his own father, the mother turns out to be pregnant – and what about the mysterious Uncle Tony who turns up? The novel explores how unknowable the motives of adults are to children, how we still have so far to go when it comes to dealing with the scourge of domestic violence, and how man hands on misery to man. There aren’t many laughs on the way to the inevitable, satisfying conclusion, but it will keep you turning the page.

Richard Gilzean (Chatwood Chapter)

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