Well, don't read this one on a cloudy day.That's my primary piece of advice. The Children of Men is an excellent book -- frankly, I enjoyed it more than the two P.D. James mysteries I read just before it -- but a happy book it's not, even at the end when there should be a sense of the world having righted its wrongs.
I worked my way through this on what proved to be a fairly overcast weekend, and never has the sun on a Monday morning looked so good. Part of me realizes that it's pretty silly to let a book affect the mood so much, but books do that, don't they? I couldn't help thinking that the premise, what must have seemed so horrifying in 1992, doesn't seem so far-fetched and that the response from the government (governments are always the greatest sources of problems in dystopian societies, aren't they?) was more than a little realistic. Like, what happens in the book doesn't even have to occur to make the government's response seem possible today?
Hard to say for sure. As for the premise, it's fairly simple: It's England, in the year 2021, and every man in the world is apparently infertile. The last human child was born on October 19, 1995, and since then no births have occurred anywhere in the world. This universal male infertility is never explained in the story; it's obviously not the point. Instead, James is working with the idea of what has (would...) happen as a result. The focus in this book, naturally, is on England, and in this case an individual has risen through the ranks to take over as the Warden of England. His name, Xan Lyppiatt, is kind of perfect for this kind of story. It's believable for an Englishman who came out of the upper classes, but it's also fierce enough -- Xan, anyone? -- for the role he performs as a pseudo-dictator.
The focus of the story is less on Xan as it is on his cousin Theo Faron, who is alternately the primary focus and the narrator, through his diary. Theo is a professor of Victorian history in what remains of Oxford's educational program. After all, there isn't exactly a revolving door of a university degree system anymore. The children born in 1995, known as the Omegas, are just beyond college age, and the program seems more focused around adults who decide to take a few classes here and there. Theo is the very definition of the apathetic product of such a society: he remembers the good old days but has no concept of how to deal with the ghastliness of what's occurring in the world around him. So he retreats into his studies, as well as his comfortable house, and does what he can to ignore everything.
Of course, there wouldn't be much of a story if he ignored things completely. Quite without desiring it, he finds himself involved with a small resistance that's eager to make some changes in England. It's arguable that Xan's doing what he can -- and, really, what is there to do? -- but there are also problems. There's the question of the Quietus, which is essentially a scheduled mass suicide of the elderly who are becoming a drain on society and know that there really won't be anyone to take care of them in a few years. The Quietus has increasingly turned into a drug-induced event that might be borderline murder (with many of these poor people having been volunteered for the suicide by those who no longer want to deal with them and thus cite them as a "burden on society"), and the resistance, calling themselves the Five Fishes, wants this changed.
There are other problems, of course. The Sojourners are the immigrants who come into England to perform service jobs, as England is safer than their own countries. They are little more than slaves, though, and they live with virtually no civil rights. There's the penal colony where those who commit violence against other citizens are sent; it's sounds about on par with a Soviet labor camp. And there are the enforced annual reproductive exams that every healthy citizen must undergo in the off chance that some male proves to be fertile.
Theo really doesn't want to get involved, but he can't help himself. There's a woman in the group (you know, there always is), and this woman captures his interest in a way he can't ignore. She's young and married, but her husband is enough of a brute and an idiot that the reader can almost forgive their burgeoning relationship. (For what it's worth, nothing happens between them until after he's out of the picture.) What's most remarkable about this woman, Julian as she's called, is that she just might prove to be the answer to the future.
What ultimately happens isn't terribly shocking, but James does work it out in a way that kept this reader turning the pages as quickly as possible. There's a heavy amount of Christian imagery in here, but I didn't find it in any way disrespectful or intended to be turned upside down. Also, I like how the character of Xan wasn't as cut-and-dry as the supposed "villain" in the story is supposed to be. Yes, he's cold and a bit merciless. But he's also given the task of keeping safe a country that needs only the tiniest nudge to descend into chaos. And that's what I found so disturbing in The Children of Men. Honestly, I can't say I fault Xan heavily for what he's doing. It's cruel in some ways, but it's also a realistic solution. Maybe (obviously?) the twenty years since this book's publication have created huge changes in the world, but I didn't see this particular dystopian England as being so impossible to understand. Sometimes, you read books like this and wonder, "How on earth did they get to that point?" I didn't see that here. It all made a little too much sense.
What I appreciated most in The Children of Men is something that was apparently altered in the film version (which I haven't seen, only scanning a summary online). In the book, it is the men who have become infertile; in the film, it is apparently the women. No, no, no. P.D. James had it right. In a dystopian world, if there's an infertility problem to be had, let it be the men. Can you imagine? A world full of infertile women? The atrocities that would be committed, the sub-human treatment that women would experience, the blame that would be heaped upon them? Think about the horrifying reproductive experiments that the Nazis performed upon women, and transfer that into a world in which woman can't even get pregnant. Let's be honest here. I'm no feminist (having seen far too much inconsistency and ideological limitation within that particular movement), but I do know that women have traditionally had a fairly bad time of throughout parts of history. If there's one thing women could do, however, it's something that men couldn't. There's something truly sacred about pregnancy and the ability to carry a growing human being and bring him into the world. But in the world that James imagines for The Children of Men, where women can't even have children, they would become a sub-species, worse than slaves, to be used indiscriminately by men. Frankly, it's a terrible idea. And P.D. James made the far better decision with her storyline. A world in which men are infertile is a sad world indeed, but at least there's less of the horrifying imbalance that would result from the opposite occurring.
Then again, there's always the question of a title. The Children of Men certainly sounds catchier than The Children of Women. That just sounds like a misguided title option for a NOW conference.
Getting back to the main point, this is a really, really interesting story. But sit down to it with a little caffeine and some sunshine nearby.
Year of publication: 1992
Number of pages: 351
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