A review by novabird
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

4.0

“A malign star kept him.”

McCarthy’s voice has a perfect pitch for a poet’s ear and he has an extraordinary vision of an artist that sees patterns in things, together they combine and add depth to reality and broaden everyday understanding making the common uncommon or momentarily rarified and the uncommon common or at least better understood. His is a dangerous and hard grace that can tackle the most unsavory of topics and still imbue them with splinters of beauty.

In Child of God, Ballard is born under a ‘bad moon arising,’ and despite the fact that McCarthy doesn’t allude to much in the way of Ballard’s upbringing he presents Ballard’s community of Sevier as inhospitable. This is one of the least favourable places, where a person would want to be without family or without a home, one that repeatedly ostracizes Ballard.

Ballard has characteristics of mythic dark proportions similar to that found in the legends of Native American, Algonquin and Ojibwa Peoples, and rendered in “Wendigo.’ Popular knowledge about Wendigo says that it represents a human who has a taste for human flesh. In anthropology studies, there is evidence that Native People when forced to deal with late winter famine would have to submit to extreme hunger and starvation. However, there were those within their tribes who were arbitrarily identified as being possessed by Wendigo and were forced to leave the community, forced into alienation and cut off from civilization, wandering alone in the wilderness.

At first Ballard finds that he communes better with the wild than with his fellow beings, then he ultimately moves towards a community where he believes that he belongs.

McCarthy brings to light from the cave of our imaginings what it is like to experience harsh loneliness of a wilderness that reaches down into one’s being and tugs at what hides there in the shadows. He offers us his accurate portrayal of the lone outsider whose only sense of power in the world is found in his gun, for what it is, and without condemnation.

The ending

Spoiler

focuses on the existential question of bodily remains, both Ballard’s and those of his victims. McCarthy does not turn his attention at any time to any funeral rites or to any thoughts of the hereafter. Instead, he leaves the reader with a lasting impression of a naturalistic night with nighthawks reeling. Is this a token nod to atheism, paganism, humanism or existentialism? Or perhaps McCarthy’s voice simply saying, “The End.”? However one reads, “Child of God,” there is a philosophy of a dangerous and hard grace that can be found within this offering.