Rationalising the irrational

Cormac McCarthy's Child Of God treads similar ground to The Road in the sense that we're delivered a winding tale of increasing depravity. That however is probably where the similarities end.

Child Of God centres around the miserable daily existence of a man, Lester, that loses a lot of what most people would take for granted. A place to call home. A place to take shelter. A reason to life beyond simply waking up each day. In essence, he lost a lot of what binds most of us together and it is in that that we see a man progressively drift further and further away from what we might consider 'appropriate behaviour'. There is an instance where Lester happens upon a dead couple in coitus in a car on the side of the road. It is here that he commits a series of actions that while entirely unplanned all the same bear the marks of a person becoming less and less... well, 'human'.

The book isn't entirely about sickening scenes. Rather interestingly, the related stories of Lester's past and upbringing serve as a suggestion of fate running its course, of a person satisfying the less-than-stellar expectations of his community. What makes this interesting is that for all Lester seems to abandon the trappings of civil society, and for all civil society finds him abhorrent, civil society all the same abides and tolerates what they themselves consider intolerable. The permissive behaviour of the community to what they knew to be really quite wrong behaviour on Lester's part raised questions I am still struggling to answer: is Lester the realised consequence of his past, or the product of a society that didn't care enough to stop him from becoming 'inhuman'?

I know my language is vague and I've meant for that to be the case. To be more precise and exacting would be to reveal too much of a book I think you might enjoy if you enjoyed The Road. You will certainly see shades of one in the other, but there is enough different in each for them to stand on their own merits. Just don't expect something quite as gripping or awkwardly tender about Child Of God.