The Son is a breathtaking epic equal in scope and intensity to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian but I think it’s a more consistently engaging read.
The story spans 160-odd years of Texan history from the mid-1800s and details the violent land grabbing, slaughter and empire building that lie at its heart.
This blood- and oil-soaked history is told through three generations, decades apart, of the McCullough family — Eli, Peter and Jeanne — and it is their voices that help crack open the myths of American frontier life.
What we’re not asked to settle for are one-dimensional outlaws, cardboard cowboys and Indians, flea-bitten Mexicans, busty barmaids and relentless violence displayed panoramically for no reason.
What’s on offer instead, are complexly drawn characters that show how the hubris, greed, power mongering and moral cowardice of individuals play out in families and societies and leave harsh legacies in generations to come.
As author Philipp Meyer told The Millions in an interview this July:
“If there’s a moral purpose to the book, it’s to put our history, the history of this country [the US], into a context. We butchered and killed our way across the continent and took every inch of it by force, or bought it for seven bucks. But on the other hand, the Native American tribes in Texas, like all humans across the entire earth, butchered and conquered and attacked their weaker neighbours and took land. In Texas, the Apaches come in and wipe out all of the other native tribes except for a few. A hundred years later, the Comanche come and do the same thing to them. And if there’s any point to the book, in the sense of having a moral direction, it’s to contextualise our creation myth.”
In Interview Magazine Meyer explained how the mythology of the US means its founders and the founders of its big family dynasties are not really viewed as human beings even though they often did incredibly unpleasant things.
“When you talk to these families now, who came from people like Eli McCullough, they think of their ancestors almost as gods.”
Fatherly wisdom?
Eli is the son of the book’s title.
The first butchery he encounters is close to home and involves his mother and sister.
He is abducted by Comanche Indians and learns their ways — which in part, of course, means taking scalps and tanning hides.
His induction into the Comanche’s physically demanding world is both frightening and exciting. Like other teenagers in the tribe he is encouraged to take a wife.
Eli is adopted as the chief’s son and renamed Tiehteti.
His chief and surrogate father, Toshaway, talks to him about the nature of bravery and a warrior’s duty to others.
“I will tell you something my father once told me. The difference between a brave man and a coward is very simple. It is a problem of love. A coward loves only himself … The brave man loves other men first and himself last.”
Unfortunately, this is not the “wisdom of the fathers” that sticks.
Several years after Eli’s acceptance into the tribe it is decimated by a bad hunting season, an outbreak of smallpox and attacks by armed white men.
Eli is traded back into white society where he struggles to find a fit.
He steals horses, sleeps outdoors and becomes a Texas Ranger.
Later still, he morphs into an egocentric tyrant called the Colonel who lives to be 100 and founds a cattle empire and then an oil dynasty.
The Colonel’s less violent and more vexed son Peter does not command the same respect as his father.
In an attempt to understand his father’s magnetism, his own character and the tendencies of other men, Peter writes: “There are those born to hunt and those born to be hunted … and I have always known I was the latter.”
He also observes: “It is as my father says. Men are meant to be ruled. The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful. He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbour’s riches are inextricably linked, for this would require action.”
Peter’s diary entries from 1915 to 1917 tell of his guilt and distress over the murder of his family’s Mexican neighbours, the Garcias, by the McCulloughs and local vigilantes.
He is deeply troubled, too, by his family’s appropriation of the Garcia’s land.
His father’s assessment of why the murders occurred is clinical: “Let me say that Garcia being Mexican has nothing to do with it. White or Mexican, the bigger a rancher was, the more liable he was to run his neighbours out.”
Peter’s conscience weighs on him heavily and he mourns how the town is changing. He’s also saddened by the panic sweeping through the family’s top Mexican hands and causing them to return to Mexican as a result of the expansion of the Ranger force.
“Despite the disappearance of the last of the original Mexican families (many of whom have been here five or ten generations— longer than any white), a new crop has arrived to fill their places. They speak no English and will be easy prey for men like Gilbert. Still, it is better than northern Mexico, where a state of open warfare persists. Dunno what they’re complaining about, said my father. At least there’s no taxes. After I got home, I rode out to help rotate the beefs off the number 19 pasture. We are getting everything cross-fenced, and as Pinkard said, this place is beginning to run like a well-oiled machine. But when does the soul go out of it. That is what no one seems to know.”
Status: A feeble bastion
The third voice in the novel is that of Peter’s granddaughter Jeanne. She inherits the family fortune and becomes an oil baroness. She displays the mettle and entrepreneurship necessary to maintain her grip in such a male-dominated world.
Jeanne suffers a fall in 2012 and tells her story from the floor of the family mansion. It seems an apt metaphor to convey where such dynasties can leave the individuals who spend their lives creating and sustaining them. Status is a feeble bastion when faced with infirmity and impending death.
Meyer took five years to write this sweeping saga and his research was exacting and visceral.
His immersion included:
- a number of close encounters with mountain lions;
- walking and sleeping under the stars in most of the settings the book takes place and spending weeks on his own in the woods;
- learning to track animals and to hunt deer with a bow and arrows;
- completing combat training in North Carolina with the aim of gaining insight into warrior culture;
- learning to shoot antique black-powder pistols;
- interviewing dozens of people, including Comanche, whose ancestors fought Texan settlers; and
- reading approximately 250 books about the history and customs of the time.
Meyer’s work has been compared to that of many of America’s greatest writers including John Steinbeck and his first novel, American Rust, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim.
The Son is garnering even more widespread and glittering plaudits — and I think they’re well deserved.
If you can stomach the violence that works like Cormac McCarthy’s and Meyer’s demand to illustrate their universally significant themes, I recommend you read The Son now.
Dethroning the gods of such mighty dynasties and painting a canvas as vast and complex as Texan history is no mean feat. To do it through characters that brim with life and evince real connection and by means of such poised and textured prose is a monumental achievement.
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