IAN McEwan’s latest novel The Children Act is his idiosyncratic take on the life of a successful female. Working in the Family Division of High Court as a judge, Fiona Maye is widely respected in law circles and takes pride in her work: “she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ”. McEwan has here created another respected professional protagonist — as he previously did in his works like Saturday and Solar — with his usual knack for perfection.

He brings up numerous Family Division cases in addition to historical judgments which only prove how meticulous a writer McEwan is: his passion for detail goes beyond the simple purpose of creating authenticity. Even though the plot of The Children Act is fairly straightforward, McEwan weaves a ruthlessly concise narrative where every word and incident has a special significance, if not directly for the plot then for the sub-narrative.

When the book opens, Fiona, who believes she brings reasonableness to hopeless situations in her professional life, is discomposed by the declaration of her 60-years-old husband Jack, a professor of ancient history, that he wants to have “one big passionate affair” before he dies. He accuses her of being wrapped up in her career and losing interest in their sexual life. This affair, in his opinion, does not signify the end of their marriage but rather confirms that over time they have become more like siblings, comfortable in each other’s company but lacking in romance. She is attacked on the grounds that “it was not devotion she lacked but passion”. Fiona, in this paralysed marriage, is more disturbed by her husband’s righteous tone and tells him if he has this affair it would be the end of their marriage. With any other writer this drama of husband’s infidelity would have taken centre stage but not with McEwan; he skilfully diverts the readers’ attention to a certain case that Fiona has to preside over in emergency. On that very night she gets a phone call regarding a Jehovah’s Witness case in which a boy who is suffering from leukemia — and will turn 18 in a few months — is refusing blood transfusions because in his religious belief it’s a defilement of blood, God’s gift to us.

When she goes to court the next day she finds herself enraged at Jake’s affair which she presumes had already begun before he decided to clear his conscience by being honest with her. She gets the lock to her apartment changed, to her surprise, despite being aware that legally she would not advise another woman to do so in such a situation.

“Self-pity in others embarrassed her, and she wouldn’t have it now”, and hence she concentrates on the Jehovah’s Witness case. Both councils and the welfare agent fail to help her make up her mind and she decides instead to see the boy, Adam, in person, a move that if not unheard of is nevertheless highly unusual. This meeting has a profound impact on Fiona as well as Adam.

With his unsettling precision of language, glacially cool prose, matter-of-fact, cool tone and intelligent handling of the technical details, McEwan masterfully increases the tension regarding the case. And when Jack comes home and admits that he found himself unable to actually have a full-fledged affair at this age, Fiona is surprised to find out how she feels about his return: “It was disappointment that he had not stayed away. Just a little longer. Nothing more than that. Disappointment.” Living in separate rooms and tiptoeing around each other, they turn into an old estranged couple “weary with each other and themselves”.

Unsurprisingly, the book focuses more on the protagonist’s psychological conflict than her life. If she confesses to be disturbed by her childlessness it is not an affront to professional successful women but part of an abstruse narrative game that has the writer playing with Fiona’s unacknowledged desires and fears. As she tries to reconstruct her life, she finds herself hurling towards a professional crisis that she fails to foresee.

One of McEwan’s revisited themes in most of his fiction is the unsettling nature of reality and truth, and he does so again over here. The writer shows us the ensuing religious freedom of Fiona’s ruling for Adam and how poorly equipped he is to handle such huge changes. Even if “it was not her business or mission to save him, but to decide what was reasonable and lawful”, her morally correct decision to save Adam’s life by blood transfusion stops a religious martyrdom but fails to provide him with an alternative vision of the world.

Moreover, Fiona’s own secure life is shattered by the intrusion of banal reality. Hence, when Fiona meets Adam she comes to the conclusion that “his defining quality was innocence, a fresh and excitable innocence, a childlike openness that may have had something to do with the enclosed nature of the sect”. Moreover, her marital crisis brings to her the realisation that “perhaps, for all a lifetime’s entanglement in human weakness, she remained an innocent, mindlessly exempting herself and Jack from the general condition”. It is this loss of innocence that culminates into an increasing unease in Fiona.

In exquisitely concise prose McEwan brilliantly unravels these very notions of individual welfare and collective morality in addition to destroying any sentimental ideas of love, marriage, success, and the innocence of childhood. 

The Children Act

(NOVEL)

By Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, UK

ISBN 978-0224101998

224pp.