The Son, by Philipp Meyer – review

Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of Texas, wrested from Mexico in 1836, Eli has miraculously reached the age of 100. Captured by Comanche Indians in boyhood, he mastered their survival skills, and was well on the way to becoming the most respected member of the tribe when smallpox struck. The all-powerful Comanches — ‘the earth had seen nothing like them since the Mongols’ — had no defence against this invisible enemy. But Eli/Tiehteti, immunised in infancy, survived.

Eli rampages through the next few decades, including a spell as state ranger when he is obliged to hunt down what remains of the people to whom he once belonged. He makes a fortune out of cattle and, later, oil, builds a big white house and fills it with European art and thankless descendants. This huge, ambitious novel opens with Eli contemplating the wrecked territory he knew in the days when ‘the trees had never heard an axe’; ‘the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today’. But Eli is as guilty as anyone of that great despoiling.

In a sense, Eli is America. His personal history, of merciless but clear-eyed courage degenerating into brutal empire-building, is Philipp Meyer’s way of rewriting the story of America’s unstoppable rise. Meyer is unflinching in his debunking of the myth of the glorious past, though at times I wish he’d flinched a little more. When it comes to nose-slitting, disembowelling, brains spooned out, and the like, I find that less is more.

Eli’s life among the Comanches is fascinating; by far the best part of the book. The detail has been ‘meticulously researched’, as is the modern way, but for the most part Meyer manages to breathe life into his descriptions of buffalo hunts, tribal feasts and sexual initiation rites.