Child of God

Few writers share McCarthy’s talent for abusing language to poetic effect. His distorted, crooked, broken syntax allowing for a literary experience which exudes as much cerebral as visceral power. Child of God, McCarthy’s third novel, can perhaps be read as the genesis-point of the author’s recognisable aesthetic: funnelling the pared down prose style of Faulkner, the dark lyricism of Poe and the gritty realism of Steinbeck, into a form which is unshakeably American.

Child of God is the tale of Lester Ballard, perhaps one of the darkest, most disturbed characters in McCarthy’s oeuvre. Ballard is an outsider, a loner, a character who is as much a creature as a man. Lurking in a dark, dank cave, and interacting primarily with the festering corpses with which he adorns underground lair, Lester is a disadjusted individual who, out-casted by his country-men, descends into paedophilia and necrophilia.

Child of God is a novel which perhaps more so than No Country for Old Men, or The Road, or even Blood Meridian, presents itself as a work of aesthetic potency. McCarthy’s use of antique words, which furnish the frame of his narrative, facilitate an unprecedented beauty, a dark, primordial lyricism, which lends Ballard an almost mythical stature. McCarthy creates in Child of God a narrative which stretches the very sinews of language with Shakespearean liberality, and in doing that, offers a haunting insight into the mind of a psychopath.