The Father Is Most Terrifying When He Is Useful

Spoiler note: This essay discusses the whole of Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s The Son of Man, including its final scene.

The father locks the estate car, checks the flashlight, spreads camouflage netting over the roof, and drags branches from the forest floor until the vehicle can barely be seen from the road. He wedges rocks beneath the rear tyres. Then he shoulders the military bag, studies his work, and tells the mother and son to follow him up the mountain. The sequence is unhurried and practical. It also places the family’s only vehicle inside a hiding place designed by the man who chose their destination.

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo lets dread enter The Son of Man through completed tasks. The father drives, carries, provisions, repairs, teaches, feeds, cleans, and nurses. Each useful act increases the family’s dependence on the person already making every important decision. His practical competence is the medium of his control.

The novel’s sharpest question concerns the jurisdiction created by care: the power to decide where another body goes, what it carries, when it rests, what counts as help, and what is owed in return. The father uses that power to gather the family inside his design. The son eventually performs many of the same actions while trying to get his newborn sister out. Their shared practical grammar makes the ending a test of whether a repeated method can acquire a new purpose.

The Authority of the Useful Man

Before the family begins the ascent to Les Roches, the father distributes the luggage. The mother receives a rucksack she can carry only with difficulty. The nine-year-old son gets a smaller bag that is still too heavy for him; he stoops and grunts when the father threads his arms through the straps. Later, when the mother asks whether the boy will manage, the father answers for him: of course he will. He then asks the child to ratify the answer. The boy says yes.

The burden is material, and so is the authority. The father decides what the boy’s body can bear, supplies the approved description of that body, and receives obedience as proof that he was right. When the mother nearly loses her balance while shouldering her own pack, she twice refuses his help. He grips her wrist, takes the rucksack anyway, and carries it across his chest. She is relieved of the weight and overruled in the same movement.

At Les Roches, the father’s hands close around the son’s again. He crouches behind the boy, cups the child’s hands in his calloused palms, aligns the revolver’s sights, regulates his breathing, and places their fingers together inside the trigger guard. The gun is unloaded, yet the lesson is already physical. The father teaches the son how to make his body an extension of a method: steady the hands, choose the target, control the breath, squeeze. At the end, the child retrieves both the revolver and the sequence the father built around it.

Car, rucksack, canteen, gun: the father repeatedly identifies a practical problem, demonstrates the solution, and assigns everyone else a place inside it. Competence organizes the violence long before he loads a bullet.

Care Lavished, Obedience Owed

The method reaches its most disturbing form after the mother’s failed attempt to escape. Exhausted and pregnant, she sends the son back to Les Roches for help. The father finds her half-conscious, raises her, takes her weight, and carries her home. As he does so, he whispers a prosecution into her ear. She has been rash, reckless, irresponsible, unworthy of his trust. “You’ve only yourself to blame.” The narration catches the moral arrangement in a single phrase: he addresses her like a sick child who has failed to respond to “the care lavished on her.”

The carrying is real. So is the rebuke. Because the father is saving her from an immediate danger, he can treat her attempted flight as evidence of incapacity and his rescue as evidence of rightful command. Help writes the law under which help will later be judged. Her refusal becomes ingratitude; his control acquires the appearance of patience.

A cardboard box in the lean-to gives that law a timetable. The son finds powdered baby milk, bottles, nappies, and second-hand infant clothes among provisions shipped to the house before their arrival. These objects were chosen to keep a newborn alive. They also prove that the father had planned an indefinite stay while the mother and child still believed they had come for the summer. The stockpile performs care and captivity at once. Its horror lies in the compatibility.

Del Amo refuses the comfort of treating all the father’s tenderness as camouflage. After the mother dies in childbirth, he cuts the umbilical cord, swaddles the premature infant, feeds her formula, holds her fiercely against his chest for warmth, and rocks her for hours by the fire. He weeps when her hand closes around his finger. He vows to care for her. These acts carry genuine feeling, and their sincerity sharpens the danger. Nothing in that tenderness permits the infant—or the son watching from the stairs—to exist outside his command. The father can love a body while treating love as possession of it.

The novel’s practical details surpass its declared theme of inherited male violence by locating domination in an ordinary transaction: a caregiver converts another person’s need into permanent authority.

The Novel Takes Back the Reader’s Work

In a 2023 interview, Del Amo said that overtly demonstrative scenes interested him less than what happens at their edges; he increasingly preferred gesture and the characters’ physical presence to explicit psychology. That preference describes The Son of Man at its most convincing. A wrist held too long, a bag taken after refusal, a spoon placed between a woman’s lips, a child’s finger enclosed on a trigger: the body registers a relation before the narration names it.

The novel sometimes distrusts this achievement. During the shooting lesson, the father launches into an ornate discourse on love, desire, betrayal, and the “dizzying void” inside human beings. A much longer account of his childhood follows in a register so composed that the narration finally describes him as saying nothing and allowing a “silent voice” to pour out. Later, the narrator announces the governing pattern directly: the madness of fathers is a poison passed from generation to generation.

The paternal history has a necessary function. It restores causes to a man who might otherwise harden into a monster built only for the plot. His father’s brutality, his own humiliation, his flight from Les Roches, and the unfinished work that draws him back make his return emotionally legible without excusing it. The problem is one of proportion and timing. Once the book names hereditary poison and supplies a near-complete genealogy of doom, the father’s choices settle into an explanation the reader has already been given. The gestures had made us judge how care acquires command; the monologue tells us which ancestral force produced the man performing them.

The prehistoric prologue applies the same pressure on a larger scale. A father finishes a wounded doe, thrusts his hand into the wound, marks his son’s cheek with blood, and briefly caresses the face he has initiated into violence. Near the end, the modern boy enters a cave and finds the ancient hunt preserved on its wall. The return is formally powerful: the contemporary family moves inside an image older than memory. It also spends the novel’s symbolic capital early. Repetition has been announced before the son’s conduct can show whether a repeated action must keep its original purpose.

The Same Grammar Under Another Hand

The son’s escape repeats the father’s procedures under a new pressure. He makes a hidden bundle as his mother once did, packing tins of food, formula, a flashlight, a survival blanket, and one of her T-shirts. He has watched the father set the combination lock, studied the storehouse, learned where the revolver is kept, and memorized how to load and hold it. He carries the infant, prepares her bottle, conceals them inside the hollow of a tree, cleans her, knots the mother’s shirt into a nappy, warms her against his chest, and keeps moving.

His practical inheritance is composite. The mother taught him attentiveness to another body: cool cloths during migraines, food prepared for a child, warmth given without a claim of ownership. The father supplied tactical knowledge: concealment, provisions, weapons, endurance. In the boy’s hands, these traditions meet. He uses the father’s methods to continue the mother’s care.

The change remains morally impure. Weak and feverish, the infant becomes bait in the final encounter. The boy places her in the birch grove and lets her cry until the sound draws the father into view, then approaches from behind with the revolver. He has protected his sister by making decisions for her, and now exposes her body to danger as part of a plan she cannot choose. The father’s jurisdiction has not disappeared; the child is struggling to redirect it under conditions the father created.

The bear offers a brief, exact counter-image. It drinks beside the children, approaches close enough for the boy to feel its breath, sniffs him, and walks away. The animal has overwhelming physical power and makes no claim on them. Against the father’s habit of turning proximity into possession, this indifference matters more than any sentimental vision of benevolent nature.

Then the cave painting tries to close the circle. The son emerges carrying the old rage, loads the same three bullets the father had assigned to the son, the infant, and himself, and finally points the weapon at the father’s chest. Del Amo leaves the shot unwritten. The father answers the barrel with an ordinary gesture, raising a crumpled cigarette to his lips with dirty, trembling fingers. In that ordinary gesture, the damaged man whose procedures the boy has learned comes back into view.

The father used branches to conceal the car that could take the family back. The son uses them to hide the life he is carrying away from Les Roches, with the father’s loaded revolver still in his hands.

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Primary text: Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, The Son of Man, translated by Frank Wynne (Text Publishing, 2024). The supplied reading file is an ebook-derived 174-page PDF; its page positions are not equivalent to the 224-page trade paperback.