“THE CHILDREN ACT” by Ian
McEwan (first published in 2014)
Twice before on this blog, I’ve dealt with novels by the
British novelist Ian McEwan
(see the posts on On Chesil Beach and Sweet Tooth) and I have vented my opinions of his work. To save myself some time, here is what I said in one of my earlier reviews:
(see the posts on On Chesil Beach and Sweet Tooth) and I have vented my opinions of his work. To save myself some time, here is what I said in one of my earlier reviews:
“I admit to having a limited and bumpy relationship with McEwan’s novels. I enjoyed Enduring Love, despite its pervasive sardonic tone; found On Chesil Beach an interesting, if limited,
reflection on defunct sexual mores; and believe Amsterdam to be the slightest, and probably least worthy,
novel ever to have won the Booker. (Gossip says it won as compensation to
McEwan for not winning with better novels in previous years). I admit to not
having read Atonement,
which some people rate McEwan’s best. (I read the “Dunkirk” section when it was
extracted in Granta, but
apart from that only saw the movie version.)”
As
you can see, I’m not a great McEwan fan, but being a fair-minded person, I
recently decided to read another of his novels just to check if I’d misjudged
him. So I plucked The Children Act
out of the local library. (Yes, I’m aware that in 2017 it was made into a movie
starring Emma Thompson – at least seven of McEwan’s novels have been filmed -
but I missed that one).
Despite
all protests to the contrary, The
Children Act is very much a “problem” or
“thesis” novel. A High Court judge has to decide a case of life-and-death and we are meant to ask if her judgement is right, or whether she has been too influenced by personal feelings. Because the case she judges involves religious beliefs, we are also asked to decide whether religious beliefs should have any weight in a court of law. These clearly are Big Issues, and while I think novels can legitimately deal with Big Issues, I also suspect that such novels are often praised by journalist-reviewers who think that Big Issues of themselves make for a Serious and Important Novel. And – to rush to my judgement before I lay out my evidence – I find The Children Act a schematic performance with unbelievable straw-man characters and a very skewed argument.
“thesis” novel. A High Court judge has to decide a case of life-and-death and we are meant to ask if her judgement is right, or whether she has been too influenced by personal feelings. Because the case she judges involves religious beliefs, we are also asked to decide whether religious beliefs should have any weight in a court of law. These clearly are Big Issues, and while I think novels can legitimately deal with Big Issues, I also suspect that such novels are often praised by journalist-reviewers who think that Big Issues of themselves make for a Serious and Important Novel. And – to rush to my judgement before I lay out my evidence – I find The Children Act a schematic performance with unbelievable straw-man characters and a very skewed argument.
The
“Children Act” of the title is the act which [in Britain and elsewhere] rules
that 18 is the age when legal adulthood begins, and therefore that legal
decisions concerning young people under 18 have to be made, or endorsed, by
their parents or guardians. So here is High Court Judge Fiona Maye, nearly 60
years old, addressed by her colleagues as “My Lady”, who specialises in the
Children’s Division and spends much of her time ruling on messy custody battles
between fractious divorcing parents. But sometimes she has to rule in medical
matters concerning children. Before her court come two Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Kevin and Naomi Henry. They are clearly good parents, they are sincere, strong
in their religious faith which, by their own testimony, has straightened out
their previously messy lives, and they love their 17-year-old son Adam. But
Adam is very sick with leukemia and needs a blood transfusion; and Jehovah’s
Witnesses believe blood transfusions are contrary to Biblical teaching. Adam’s
parents – and apparently Adam himself - refuse the blood transfusion which the
medical profession says he should have. So here are lawyers for the medical
profession and lawyers for Adam’s parents arguing the case in Fiona Maye’s
court.
Up
to a point, McEwan deals even-handedly with the case. Obviously the lawyers for
the medical profession are rational and clearly-spoken people. But Adam’s
parents are not presented as fanatics or fools and their lawyer makes many
plausible points against blood transfusion.
Even
so, the argument becomes very skewed once High Court Judge Fiona Maye decides
to visit Adam personally in hospital, to see whether he has really rejected
treatment of his own free will, or whether he has been unduly influenced by his
parents. Adam, it turns out, is sure of his faith and really does believe blood
transfusion is wrong. But he is also an alert, perceptive, sensitive young man
who writes poetry and aspires to play the violin. Indeed (and at this point I
thought “Bollocks!”) he plays his violin for the visiting High Court Judge and
she sings along to “Down By the Salley Gardens”. And quite clearly the
60-year-old judge gets a kind of sentimental crush on the 17-year-old boy.
I
don’t say that, in his methodical and thesis-minded planning of the novel,
McEwan hasn’t prepared us for this. Even before the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ case
comes up, we know that Fiona Maye is emotionally vulnerable. She has long
lamented the fact that she has no children, and to make matters worse her marriage
to Jack, an historian and academic, may be on the rocks. You see, Jack has
suggested that he be allowed to go off and have an affair with a much younger
woman, pleading for “open marriage”, and Fiona has been appalled and has kicked
Jack out and is reassessing her sterile life… and now she meets this sympathetic
boy. So here is that thing about whether she is letting her emotions cloud her
judgement. She goes back to court and decides that Adam should be given the
blood transfusion… but has she been swayed in this by her own feelings for the
boy, her own desire for him to live because he fills an emotional void in her
life?
I
confess that at this point in the novel I was almost laughing. McEwan’s
strategies are so obvious. Pause for a moment, dear reader, and consider this
scenario. What if the youth Fiona Maye meets were an uncouth, foul-mouthed,
pimply-face yobbo rather than a civilised, poetry-writing, violin-playing
paragon? Would his life be any less
important? The type of situation Ian McEwan sets up is very much akin to those
old anti-lynching movies Hollywood used to make, where the lynch victim always
just happened to be innocent of any crime. A real anti-lynching film
would have told us that lynching was wrong even if the victim were guilty as
hell, because in and of itself lynching, which ignores due process of law, is
always wrong. McEwan skews his whole case as soon as Adam (what an obviously
resonant name!) personally enters the novel. Okay, McEwan has to have somebody
with whom the judge can become emotionally involved. But it still manoeuvres
readers into thinking what a pity it would be if this particular young
man - such a nice violin-playing, poetry-reading chap - were to die; whereas a
more credible morality would say what a pity it would be if any youth should
die in these circumstances.
Additional, thesis-related thoughts
occur to me. Aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses fairly easy targets for a secularist
novelist like McEwan? The JWs’ rejection
of blood transfusion has been dealt with in novels and movies before, in loaded
form where rejection of such medical treatment is seen as self-evidently
foolish. (By coincidence I recently watched on Youtube the ancient British film
Life for Ruth, made in 1962, which
argues the case in just these terms.) I am sure that 99% of readers (including
me) would already be inclined to reject JW beliefs on this particular matter,
before they had even read the first page of The
Children Act. McEwan might have found it harder to argue his case against
religious beliefs if he were dealing with a more mainstream, and more
sophisticated, religious group than with this small sect. In the cases which
Fiona Maye remembers, McEwan takes passing digs at other religious groups
anyway - quarrelsome conservative Jews
in a custody battle; a Catholic bishop opposed to separating conjoined twins
because one of them will certainly die. Really, in McEwan’s novels, religion is
already a priori condemned and dosesn’t
stand a chance.
I
have often said negative things about reviewers who praise or condemn novels
solely in terms of the issues and ideas they deal with, rather than also considering
how the novel is written. Style and substance are always intertwined. I don’t
want to be a hypocrite in this matter, as you will have noted that I am here
criticising McEwan in terms of his (very loaded) ideas. But of style, let me
say simply that every calculation McEwan makes to build up his thesis is plain
to see. With just a little gussying-up, his characters are really ideas
representing positions he either accepts or rejects. You can, as the cliché
says, see the joins.
While
I have not seen the film that was made from this novel, I was amused to read
one lukewarm review of it in the NZ
Listener. The reviewer complained of the film’s melodramatic moments,
saying that in the film “subtle tragedy
gives way to melodrama” and that the film (scripted by McEwan himself)
betrayed the novel. Sorry my friend, but the novel itself is already unsubtle
melodrama. This was pointed out in another review of the film (in the Guardian) which said that the film
merely exposed the inherent flaws in the novel – especially the notion that a
cancer-stricken patient, recently at death’s door, would be able to stalk a
High Court judge around much of England. Quite.
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