A father and son out hunting: Van's book is 'a vision of hell focused on nature'. Photograph: AlamyIn their various ways, all David Vann's books are autopsies. His work, which is littered with corpses, is characterised by an exhaustive insistence on the mechanics of violence.
His third novel, Goat Mountain, starts with a catastrophe and steadily deteriorates from there. An 11-year-old boy goes on a hunting trip with his father, his grandfather and his father's friend, Tom. (We never learn any of the other characters' names, or anything much about their lives outside the airless Aristotelian enclosure of the plot, which is narrated by the boy from the remote vantage of a damaged adulthood.)
In the opening chapter, the group spots a poacher on family land. The father, observing the distant figure through the magnification of his rifle sight, hands the rifle to his son so that he can take a look at the intruder. Powerful forces of instinct and inculcation combine in the boy ("Some part in me just wanted to kill," he reflects, "constantly and without end"); without any thought or seeming volition, he squeezes the trigger and shoots the man dead.
The rest of the novel is about what happens: what happens to the body, what happens to the group and what happens to the idea of morality, of humanity, when a man has been killed in the same way, and for the same reason, as a wild animal – which is to say, no reason at all. "There was no joy as complete and immediate as killing," he writes. "Even the bare thought of it was better than anything else."
Part of the experience of reading Vann (over time across his oeuvre, and within individual books) is a kind of uneasy curiosity about just how dark he's going to get and where he's going to go to find that darkness. This new excursion is as harrowing as anything he has written, as thrillingly desolate, in its way, as the traumatic hallucinations in Legend of a Suicide, the brilliant semi-autobiographical debut in which he reopened the childhood wound of his father's suicide over a sequence of stories and a novella.
There is a long and gruelling section in the middle of Goat Mountain, in which the boy kills his first buck, which is one of the most intense and detailed examinations of an act of violence I have ever read in a work of fiction. Its unflinching realism – its patient delineation of the labours of killing, dismembering, dragging – eventually becomes a kind of nightmare surrealism. It is at once deeply disturbing and powerfully propulsive, a hallucinatory insight into what it means, and how it feels, to kill. The book is a vision of hell focused not on the supernatural, but on nature itself.
Vann is a writer who hunts big game. He tracks the same wild territory as Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy – the violence and perversity at the root of what we call human nature, the animal savagery that is our first inheritance. "Cain was the first son," says the narrator, an atheist who looks to the Old Testament to apply some gauze of meaning to the raw wound of his own violent past. "The first born of Adam and Eve. Cain is how we began, all who didn't get to start in paradise."
For all its unyielding darkness, Goat Mountain is, perhaps perversely, an exhilarating experience. It is, first of all, cathartic in the way of all good tragedies. But it is also exhilarating for the least perverse of reasons: the experience of reading a novelist of David Vann's rare artistry and vision.
