BUFFALO SOLDIER

Philipp Meyer learnt to kill with bow and arrow for his novel about old Texas, writes Bron Sibree

The Son

Philipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster, R215)

THERE aren’t many novelists who’ll admit to drinking buffalo blood in the interests of researching their books. But Philipp Meyer brings a zeal for historical accuracy to his second novel, The Son, that’s exceeded only by his literary ambitions — the kind of outsized ambitions that trump even those of his debut, American Rust, which won a slew of awards and had critics likening it to Steinbeck and Hemingway for the way it explored the end of the American Dream.

Five years in the writing, eight in conception, The Son fostered in Meyer a compulsion to learn to kill animals with guns and bow and arrow, to tan hides, study plants and track footprints. He even spent a month with Blackwater, the private miliary contractor, he says, “to learn about how one philosophically deals with death and killing when it’s your profession and your way of life”.

The Son is about violence as a way of life. It’s an epic, blood-drenched family saga that dares to challenge the foundation myths of America as it charts the violent christening of the state of Texas. A plait of rotating narratives of different generations of the McCullough clan, it begins in the voice of Eli McCullough, who was born on the same March 1836 day that Texas declared its independence from Mexico and was 12 when Comanches slaughtered his mother and siblings and took him captive.

The book then shifts to the present where Eli’s great-granddaughter Jeanne, an 86-year-old oil tycoon lying dazed on the floor of her Texas ranch, unspools her memories.

Eli’s son Peter, who rebels against his father in the 1900s when Eli orders the mass murder of a neighbouring Mexican family, narrates the central strand, while the voice of an illegal Mexican immigrant is a late entry in the novel, a wisp of unacknowledged history that comes to define the whole.

And for Meyer, who declares his monumental ambitions at the outset by invoking Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that is the entire point. Much of the violent history that he has so diligently researched and seamed into his narrative remains largely unacknowledged within the US, yet defines its collective contemporary psyche.

“The rise of Texas as a power closely parallels that of America’s rise to power. Texas was a war zone in 1870 when New York had been a fairly cosmopolitan city for 200 years. Then oil was discovered in Texas, which was a transformative thing, not just for America, for the Earth. Everything in modern life depends upon petroleum. The Spindletop oil discovery in 1901 was the beginning of the modern age. If oil had been found in New York, America would be a different place, but because you have this place that’s newly settled, incredibly violent, now coming into incredible wealth, that is, in a way, what defines America.”

New York-born, Baltimore-raised Meyer will launch into a treatise on the historical patterns of violence and the competing mythologies that underwrite this view, and that are brought home so potently in The Son, at the drop of a ten-gallon hat. The genesis of the book lay in his discovery, soon after he moved to Texas in his 30s, of the truth of the so-called Bandit Wars of 1910 and 1918. “Some 5 000 to 6 000 Mexican-Americans were murdered and others were disenfranchised mostly by force, and no one’s heard of this. That was what lodged in my mind and I knew I was going to end up writing about that.”

Give him half a chance and he’ll also cite you chapter and verse on the nature of risk. The son of an artist and a biology teacher, Meyer has often described himself as a person with an “extremely high risk tolerance”, and in many ways his 39 years so far are testament to the notion that risk can pay off. He describes his first big risk as dropping out of school at 16 to work as a bicycle mechanic, “which upset everyone”. Six years later, after being rejected by every Ivy League college in the US, he talked his way into Cornell University, where he realised he wanted to be a writer. “You have to keep taking risks,” he says. “You just won’t get what you want if you don’t.”

The Son, already riding high on the bestseller lists, is being hailed as the epitome of the great American novel — and the finest historical novel to emerge from the US this century. “The reason that Americans seem more comfortable with violence,” he says, “is that we are. Violence, fighting and taking this continent inch-by-inch is what got us our country. We’ve never really seen the downside of the comfort we have with violence, as the Europeans have, the Asians have. I think until you understand that, you’re not going to understand Texas and to a certain extent you’re not going to understand America.” — @BronSibree