The Solitude of the Outcast
I approached "Child of God" with tempered expectations as despite Cormac McCarthy's impressive list of 5* reviews from me, this is a much earlier work.
To my delight, "Child of God" still packs quite a punch in its short length. It is distinctly McCarthy, carrying all the hallmark brutality and elegance I've come to cherish in his writing. Though the beautiful and majestic lyrical turns of later works is not quite present, the visceral horror certainly is.
In many of his later books we have mostly 'good' people in bad situations, or meeting (very) 'bad' people; here our protagonist is straight up bad, and getting worse.
The story starts in a unhurried manner, potentially disguising its author were it not for the evocative depictions of the Southern landscape. But the disguise soon falls away, revealing a story that accelerates with grim intensity. Lester Ballard, the protagonist, is a pariah, navigating through a life of solitude and eventual depravity, with McCarthy's treatment of his journey both sympathetic and repellant.
Do you want to know the nitty gritty details of necrophilia? Are you OK when it is funny? Then this book is for you!
The work is well structured with a late reveal, and an unnecessary but very McCarthy postscript.
Amidst the unsettling descent, McCarthy's prose is piercing, but it is not at the level I know and love from the later books. It's dark and nasty. I have fewer quotes, but you can see the themes he will keep writing about
"You think people was meaner then then they are now? No, I don't, i think people are the same from the day God frist made them"
In "Child of God," McCarthy once again delves into the dark complexities of human nature, and the often uncomfortable question of just how far away from the depths of depravity are any of us?