18/07/2013 Meet the Author

architecture? You have eight! now it is time for this week's Meet

the Author. Ten years ago, Philip I am became a

writer. He was working on Wall Street. His first novel, American

Rust was well received. Now he has written the Son. It is not just a

saga worthy of an airport blockbuster, it is also a deeply

researched historical novel, vivid, story we think you will know. It is

something we see in countless Western, the opening up of the

frontier, fighting off the vicious Indians, and so on. This book is a

deliberate challenge to that traditional notion. Absolutely.

you grow up in the US, you are aware of these differing myths. There is

the John Wayne myth of the innocent settlers who move west, and a lot of

Americans fantasise about this time, the land was open, there were no

people, you moved to the edge of a settlement, hacked out a plantation

house for yourself and through hard work you made a name for yourself

and got property. The competing mythology is that the vicious

settlers move into the Native American lands, brutally kill off

the Native Americans, who are equally seen as noble,

philosophically superior, spiritually superior. They were sort

of greater beings who were close to the earth compared with the

rapacious white folks. The truth is not even between the two. The truth

is that neither of those mythologies were accurate. So what do you

think? People were actually the same. The history of North America

was not so different to the history of Europe. Cultures rose and fell,

assaulted each other. In Texas alone, the Spanish arrived, and by

1650, the Apache Indians coming and wipe out almost every other Indian

tribe in Texas. This is an area the size of France. By 1750, the

Comanche Indians coming and wipe out the Apaches. And by 1830, 1840, the

whites coming and begin to challenge the Comanche is. Your central

character, Eli, is kidnapped at 13 and brought up by Comanches, and

then becomes a cattle baron after a chequered career. What he has

learned from this and from his upbringing is that violence and

greed other way to get what you want? Absolutely. I think all

nations construct this mythology to excuse whatever acquisitive and

vicious and violent Avia got them their way and their re-sources, and

we all do this. All nations construct these mythologies to

dehumanise however -- whoever they have taken the land from. There is

one particularly distressing episode where the Comanche is capture a

white man and torture him to death. And Eli doesn't step in and end his

sufferings. Did you have second thoughts about writing the

violence? The politically correct part of me often doubted that this

was the right thing to do, but your duty as a writer, an artist, is to

tell the truth. The violence in the book is historically based. This is

not me thinking about what this might have been like, it is taken

from historical records. The fact is that the brutality was equal on both

sides. The error of authenticity includes the language. There is one

bit on where Eli was talking about living in the city. He said it was

nothing but guttersnipe and gay cats, warmongers and Sunday men. I

love the slang. You did the research, you learn is to fire a

bow, you learned to kill a buffalo, you drank offer low blood. Why go to

such detail? There are two types of novelist, those who are quite

comfortable if they don't understand every historical detail all the

facts of the environment they are writing about, and an unfortunately

for me, I am on the other side. Unless I see the land quite clearly,

unless I know where the people slept, how they ate, their money

came from, who did they vote for. Eli's son, Peter, is another central

character, writing a diary later. He is the only character with a moral

compass. He is horrified when the families go out and massacre the

Mexican families. Then there is Eli's great-granddaughter,

Julianne, who becomes an oil baron in the 20th-century in Texas, and

she is as tough as the old man. What does the McCulloch family tell us

about modern Texas? The family is certainly representative of a

modern, powerful Texas family. But they are like most of the powerful

families in America, whether you are talking about land in New York state

or Pennsylvania all that land was taken. All these fortunes were

fundamentally extracted, fundamentally based on taking

resources at the lowest possible price. This is how all wealth is

essentially built. And you describe a Texas in the 1850s that was green

and lush, and after a century of cattle ranching, it is gone. It is.

Some of that was intentional. If you look at the Middle East, this is

what humans do. Babylon was a rich, lush, beautiful place which is now a

desert. This is what people do, they extract resources, not always

intentionally, but they take too much. We tend to turn fertile areas

to desert, fruits to thorns. This is the movement of history. This is

what we do. This is a bleak book. It describes a morally bankrupt society

in which the people at the top got there or there and just as, their

ancestors got their by greed. don't think of it that way. Here we

are, having children, falling in love, building a society, reading

books, and I think that Faulkner had the same idea. His books appear to