BY: MOLLY FINN
BOOK REVIEW
THE CHILDREN OF MEN
P.D. James
Alfred A. Knopf, $22,241 pp.
It's no big deal if you're disappointed in a murder mystery you pick up for a few hours of entertainment, even if the author has been acclaimed as "the queen of crime." But in The Children of Men, the queen--P.D. James--has raised the stakes considerably and in the process she raises our expectations. Among the areas she addresses in this futuristic novel are a sterility of body and spirit leading to the physical end of mankind and the destruction of society, questions of individual and governmental power, religious belief, love, redemption. James posits a world in which the human species has lost the ability to reproduce. The realization, in the year 2008, that not one of the generation born in 1995 could produce fertile sperm leads to "an almost universal negativism...like an insidious disease...with its... symptoms of lassitude, depression, ill-defined malaise, a readiness to give way to minor infections, a perpetual disabling headache." Most people have succumbed to this malady. Our hero, Theodore (Theo) Faron, historian and Oxford don, is disillusioned with his vocation ("History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species") and fights the disease with weapons that are also his consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature. His cousin Xan, the dictator who calls himself the Warden of England, is immune to the disease, protected, Theo speculates, "by an egotism so powerful that no external catastrophe can prevail against it."
As the poor cousin regularly invited to the country estate for the summer, Theo was Xan's companion but never friend--throughout their youth, and he later served as advisor on Xan's Council, a position from which he has resigned. When Theo is approached by a small group of dissidents who call themselves the Five Fishes it is because they think he can influence the Warden to carry out their program of reforms. With the introduction of the Five Fishes, the book changes from a detailed and depressing description of the death throes of the world into an adventure story about its rebirth.
The book is divided into two main sections with titles that reveal the direction the narrative will take, the first being Omega and the second, Alpha. Christian symbolism abounds. Although religious services are rare in the England of 2021, and the churches have all but fallen into ruin, it is in a church where Theo went "to listen to the singing, not to take part in an archaic act of worship" that he is first approached by one of the Five Fishes. This group habitually meets in churches. One member is a priest who celebrates Mass regularly for himself and the one other believing Fish. A child is conceived by two "rejects" (people who escape regular fertility testing because they have physical defects), is born in a woodshed, and is clearly intended to bring the human race back to life.
James's projection of how mankind is likely to respond to a bewildering turn of events is the most interesting aspect of the book. We should have been warned in the early 1990s, says Theo, with the "search for alternative medicine, the perfumed oils, the massages, the stroking and anointing, the crystal-holding, the nonpenetrative sex," when pornography and sexual violence became more explicit but figures showed a slump in the number of children being born.
By 2021, people baptize dolls and gather to watch and celebrate the birth of a litter of kittens. Theo notes in his diary, written "as a defense against personal accidie":
In our universal bereavement, like grieving parents, we have put away all painful reminders of our loss. The children's playgrounds...have been dismantled...the asphalt grassed over or sown with flowers like small mass graves. The toys have been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children....Only on tape...do we now hear the voices of children ....
In the book's most chilling passage, old people are weighted with sandbags, put on crumbling barges, and, to the accompaniment of a brass band playing "Bye Bye, Blackbird" and "Somewhere over the Rainbow," are towed out to sea. This procedure, known as the Quietus, is euphemistically referred to as "the mass suicide of the old." As part of its social program, the Council "pays handsome pensions to the relatives of the incapacitated and dependent old who kill themselves."
Witnessing the Quietus is a turning point for Theo, the book's only even minimally interesting character, who realizes that"faced with some abominations, a man had no option but to step onto the stage," and decides to see Xan and convey the demands of the Five Fishes. Before the experience he says of himself "I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything." Afterwards, "feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel." For the remainder of the book, Theo accompanies the Fishes as one of the five is captured, another defects, and the group goes into hiding, traveling in stolen cars, eating stolen food, racing, with several narrow escapes, away from the dreaded Council and toward the woodshed. In the course of this adventure, Theo learns to feel not only pain but also love.
Placing the words in the mouth of one of the five members of Xan's Council, P.D. James summarizes: "You [Theo] know what evils have been perpetrated through the ages to ensure the survival of nations, sects, religions, even of individual families. Whatever man has done for good or ill has been done in the knowledge that he has been formed by history, that his life-span is brief, uncertain, insubstantial, but that there will be a future, for the nation, for the race, for the tribe. That hope has finally gone except in the mind of fools and fanatics. Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast."
Because James is known as a writer of murder mysteries, readers might expect that the plot, the suspense of the unfolding story, the excitement of the chase would provide the main interest of this book. Unfortunately, the unfolding story, buried in a mountain of detail, holds littie suspense, the chase little excitement. The framework of the book, all too plain to see, is never richly clothed; the numerous characters wander over a skillfully depicted landscape like so many sticks. It is too difficult to believe a redeemer will rise from the bed in the woodshed. The idea was a good one, but like so many of P.D. James's mysteries, this novel makes you wonder what makes her the queen.
BY: MOLLY FINN
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