Child of God
A novel by Cormac McCarthy
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East of the Evening Redness: Reading backwards from ‘Blood Meridian’
Introducing oneself to Cormac McCarthy through his 1985 novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a rewarding, if challenging, way to get acquainted with the talents and virtues of this deeply literary author, with one caveat: upon finishing, it rather feels like there’s nowhere to go but down. Not only is Meridian often hailed as his magnum opus or ‘Great American novel’, but it is hard to imagine such extreme heights of sublimity being captured twice by one author . . .
As I read backwards from Meridian through the early stages of his bibliography, I’ll be hoping to overturn this gut feeling as I highlight his less often read works. Inevitably, this will be a tremendously unfair exercise; no book deserves to be compared with, or even read after, Meridian. But there is one advantage: it puts just as much focus on what McCarthy’s earlier novels do that Meridian doesn’t, as the inverse. In reading backwards through time from my first McCarthy novel, I’ll be looking at what each of these novels, each of which boasts a striking blurb of its own, uniquely brings to the table.
Child of God
Child of God, McCarthy’s third novel, second in this series, was a big surprise for me. It was actually the McCarthy novel I knew most about prior to reading, having heard a friend talk about it on several occasions. Or, at least, I knew some things about the plot, specifics of its criminal subject matter, etc. But leave it to McCarthy to approach subjects like necrophilia and delinquency with nuance, compassion, and something like understanding. Certainly everyone knows the inimitably expert prose McCarthy boasts, but the praise there is most often directed towards the beauty of his language. In Child of God, all this is present, but what really makes the novel what it is is McCarthy’s talent for selecting the form and the style to make something unique out of a story that has been the fascination of countless other writers.
In the early chapters, the use of an unreliable narrator makes itself apparent, something I’ve not seen McCarthy use before. This is not the unreliable narration of the criminal protagonist himself, as in Lolita, but of anonymous, in-world characters—members of the community who stand against the criminal protagonist of Lester Ballard. Themselves nameless and with only a few hints towards their own identities or even their roles within the community, these narrators act as stand-ins for the moral judgments of the community entire. We don’t know or need to know who these people are; as much as McCarthy is exploring the psychology of an outcast and criminal, his is also telling his readers a story about the reactions of communities against people, like Ballard, who represent a kind of “other” that can locate no home within those communities. As such, their anonymity helps to convey a sense of mob-mentality that has emerged against Ballard even before the events of the novel had begun.
This is not to say you will find any kind of hero in Ballard—but nor is he the same embodiment of pure evil that Meridian’s Judge Holden is. In Child of God, McCarthy is instead presenting the author with a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: which came first, Ballard’s isolation from community, love, parental guidance; or his villainy, his criminality, his deviant abnormality? Part of the pleasure of the novel is in never being told;—being expected to make up one’s own mind. In a curious way, the novel tries to sit outside of group mentality in that fashion, preferring the reader’s own individual verdict to come through. Even better (if you are anything like me) is being unable to settle on any kind of conclusion; more than anything, I love novels and films that hold me hostage for days thinking about them. The incredible nuance of Child of God fosters, even demands, as much.
I’m nearing the end of what I can say without wholly spoiling the novel—I don’t want to do what McCarthy explicitly tries to avoid, and bias you with the particulars of my opinions about Ballard and the communal narrators—but as a parting comment I will also mention that the brevity of this novel, rather than depriving it of the depth available to the reader in Meridian or Suttree, only serves in the novel’s favour in this instance. There is scarcely a chapter which did not have me pausing or re-reading to make sure I had taken in the full weight of McCarthy’s metaphors and symbols. House fires, gorilla wrestling, scalp-wigs, legless robins, academical dissections of the body—all of these vignettes and more can you find in Child of God, each of them strikingly meaningful, very deliberately placed within the context of the novel’s barebones plot.
These symbols are the meat upon the bones of plot, even. Again, I will not spoil the pleasure of your reading by regurgitating my interpretations to you before you can taste them yourself. But do read the novel, and give it your best attention—Child of God is certainly more accessible in many ways than other McCarthy novels, but it still rewards close readings bountifully. The language itself, the metaphors, the symbols—these, as much as anything, are the story, the characterisation. They help to give meaning to a strange plot that under anyone else’s pen might have seemed like meaningless violence.
Also east of the Evening Redness—more in this series:
- Suttree
- Child of God (this article)
- Outer Dark
- The Orchard Keeper (pending)
