The Most Dangerous Cudgel
Reviews
By Robin McLean
In a literary world where the domestic and personal are the engines of most fiction, I am ever-hungry for and entranced by novels that engage me—even a little bit—within a broader, more heroic moral landscape. Novels that go beyond the domestic and familiar; novels that venture into the mythic, the larger-than-human; novels that blast the micro into the macro, that dwell in the in-your-face realms that rattle my personal cage.
But such novels are rare. As far as I can tell, they’re often difficult to place, as publishing houses seek to stay alive by producing books full of pleasingly “relatable,” stories angling to make us feel good about ourselves. Of Cattle and Men, by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry, is one of those rare novels—a truly crafty and far-adventuring book. This spectacular short novel delves into the life of one man—Edgar Wilson—who believes his soul to be in dire jeopardy. He is not alone. Through Edgar, the book also manages to insinuate itself into all our contemporary souls: we who have drifted far from nature in our modern, mechanized times. The book achieves great feats of fiction by elevating the most humble and degraded beings—dying cattle and forgotten men in a down-and-out slaughterhouse—to luminous heights. By way of ambitious subject matter, deceptively simple storytelling, and beautiful language, the novel transforms these poor animals (human and non-human) into angels, devils, avengers. Into tragic and mystical heroes.
Edgar Wilson is our guide through the world of Of Cattle and Men. He is a mostly silent and trapped man who accepts silence and captivity with a general passivity interrupted only occasionally by the cool, murderous actions required by his moral compass. The stun operator of a slaughterhouse, Edgar blesses cows (and other animals) by the dozens each day before knocking them unconscious moments before their throats are cut, followed by decapitation and butchering. Edgar believes he is relieving these animals of their suffering. He also believes he is damned. “His precision is a rare talent that bears a preternatural knowledge for handling ruminants,” we are told. “He is not proud of what he does, but if someone has to do it, let it be him, who has pity on those irrational beasts.”
Edgar drives a road traveled by bikes, meat trucks, and horse-drawn carts along a toxic river poisoned by cow blood and viscera. This is his normal life, a life of death we grow accustomed to through Maia’s exquisite sentences. Page after page, the novel manages to render the dirty, bloody, the workaday grizzle of the slaughterhouse into a medium for exploring modern passivity, willful unconsciousness, responsibility and the lack of it, and the power of rumination in the face of corporate and mechanized cruelty toward sentient but powerless beings.
Mercy. Who gets it?
Woe to whoever crosses Edgar Wilson’s moral line. Woe to Zeca, a sadistic young coworker in the same endless stun line as Edgar. Poor, dumb Zeca does not calm or bless the cows’ souls. He does not treat the cows as worthy beings. He does not pity them. He is cruel. Edgar quickly deems Zeca “no good,” and Edgar just as quickly kills him for being so, using the same well-aimed blow the cows receive, his body flung in the same river. From this quiet but brutal murder on, Edgar leads us through this perilous, beautiful, and earthy book, shifting from stark Cormac McCarthy-esque realism into a larger reality well beyond arrogant, “rational,” human understanding.
The line between beasts and men is slim in Of Cattle and Men. Cows and men alike arrive to live grueling lives, then die in just as poor conditions. “To die a free man is to die a lucky man,” Edgar says. Perhaps the ruminants want the same. Here death comes swiftly—often with dizzying unexpectedness— whether by stun mallet, eel bite, or suicide. No one is well. Tensions rise. The men are desperate and suspicious. Rage is suppressed but ever-present. Even the cows are enraged. No one sees light at the end of their life’s tunnel. Do the cows know death is near? The men are sure they don’t, but Edgar Wilson is not sure. Something is wrong with the cows, he knows. They are up to something—a bovine plot.
So it goes, out from the bloody opening, out into the possibilities of sentient consciousness via the open, resigned heart of Edgar Wilson. He has the same detached belief in his own judgment as one of McCarthy’s judges and killers, Old Testament-style, outside man’s law. (How would we rate Edgar’s worldview? Zeca is not the first to die by his hand; he’s killed the “no good” before.) Biblical in scale and language, Of Cattle and Men is a book to squirm beneath; to measure oneself against.
In one unforgettable scene later in the book, Edgar is tempted to kill again. A group of self-satisfied students, scribbling in clean-paged notebooks, tour the slaughterhouse in neat clothes. One white clad student asks blood-soaked Edgar, “Don’t you think slaughtering these animals is a crime?”
“I do,” he says.
“So, do you think of yourself as a murderer,” she asks.
“I do,” he says.
His response silences the student, but not for long. She persists, eventually asking, “Aren’t you ashamed?” We are told Edgar “knows his place and obligations.” He will not kill the student or fling her in the river. Instead, he asks, “Have you ever eaten a hamburger.”
She has.
“How do you think it got there?” he continues, handing her the bloody stunning mallet. He thrusts her into the stun box. Weeping, she escapes. She gets off easy, as no other beings in the story do. It’s here that the story turns, expanding into its most ambitious realms. I won’t spoil the rest for you. But I will warn you: the student is one of us, or most of us, reading, clean and warm in our homes. And sometimes the cleanest mirror makes the most dangerous cudgel.
Robin McLean worked as a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first story collection, Reptile House, won the BOA Fiction Prize and was twice a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. Her debut novel, Pity the Beast, was noted as a best book of fiction in 2021 in the The Guardian and Wall Street Journal. Her second story collection—Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing—was published in October 2022, was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times, and was longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada. She lives in the high desert West.
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