Only the Devil Is Here
Stephen Michell
A blighted natural landscape being traversed by a man and boy has become a popular motif in contemporary fiction, informing such novels as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and John Jantunen’s A Desolate Splendour. Stephen Michell enters this same terrain with his debut novel, and once again we have the stoic, mysterious father figure (here named Rook) protecting the boy (Evan) from the many dangers of the road. It’s all very archetypal as well as apocalyptic, but Michell shows that he’s a capable writer with this kind of material in several cinematic sequences. The theological message, however, left me a bit confused with its inversion of the traditional hierarchies of darkness of light. I’ve nothing against radical re-imaginings of Christian mythology, but think in this case it might have been better to leave the more familiar religious elements out of the mix. One gets the sense that this is a world the Father has ceased to take much of an interest in.
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