Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“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: 

“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.

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.

Where the novel goes from this point reaches further and further into the realm of implausibility… so I won’t bother synopsising it. I began to wonder if the word “Act” in the title was meant to be a verb as much as a noun, not only because the legally-defined child (Adam) acts, but because the actions and thoughts of Fiona Maye are those of a child – extremely self-centred. The youth gets a crush on her and he (unbelievably for one debilitated by a serious disease) stalks her around England. She impulsively reciprocates his feelings for one brief moment, then regrets it. What an immature twit. It ends in tears. The characterisation of Fiona Maye is artificial at best.

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.