‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan – Another Day in Family Court

‘The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan   (2014) – 221 pages

 

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“I apologize for being so obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful I will never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.” – Ian McEwan

 “You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.” – Ian McEwan

Fiona May in ‘The Children Act’ is a judge in the Family Division of the High Court in London.  Every workday she must decide complex emotional cases of divorce and custody of children, of terrible disagreements between two parents, and arguments about children’s medical treatment.  She has devoted her life to the law.  She is 59 years old, married, childless.

At the beginning of ‘The Children Act’, her husband Jack announces that since they haven’t made love for ‘seven weeks and a day’ he is leaving to embark on ‘one big passionate affair’ with a younger woman.  Fiona is most concerned that night about writing her decision for tomorrow morning’s custody case, but she does get the locks changed on their apartment so Jack can’t get back in the apartment without asking her.

“A professional life spent above the affray, advising, then judging, loftily commenting in private on the viciousness and absurdity of divorcing couples, and now she was down there with the rest, swimming with the desolate tide.”

There is one legal case that is the focal point of ‘The Children Act’.  A seventeen year old boy, Adam Henry, has leukemia, and his parents refuse to allow life-saving blood transfusions due to their religion as Jehovah’s Witnesses.    Adam himself goes along with his parents’ wishes even though this could result in his quick and early death.  Judge May must decide whether or not to override the boy and his parents’ refusal.   In order to make the right decision Fiona May decides she must visit the boy at the hospital.

“Adam’s unworldliness made him endearing, but vulnerable.  She was touched by his delicacy, by the way he stared fiercely at his sheet of paper, perhaps trying to hear in advance his poem through her ears.”

 I have been reading Ian McEwan since from the beginning of his fiction writing career.  I still have a special fondness for his early macabre disturbing novels and stories such as ‘The Cement Garden’ and ‘The Comfort of Strangers’, and have much enjoyed and admired his later works including ‘Atonement’ and ‘On Chesil Beach’.

In the new novel ‘The Children Act’,  judge Fiona May is a strong intelligent female protagonist.  Mc Ewan has pulled off that difficult feat for a man of writing from a female point of view.  Fiona May rings true as an exceedingly wise professional woman who must decide on critical issues and still deal with a wandering husband.

There are some nice musical touches with Fiona May singing to accompany Adam on the violin in the hospital and she harmonizing in the Christmas concert.

Perhaps I wished for a more interesting exciting court case for her to be involved in and rule on.  These instances of people refusing medical treatment for religious reasons were momentous new stories about a dozen or so years ago, but now they seem somewhat mundane and ordinary.

Despite its unexpected end, ‘The Children Act’ seemed a little too schematic and contrived.  It did not have the strong impact for me of Ian McEwan’s best work of which there is much.