By Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
The Children Act
Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
*****
Afterwards, the impression that remained was one of metal. Dull lead sky, platinum temples, silver rims around appraising slate-coloured eyes, pewter wool jacket, the gleam of zinc kitchen counters in the background and a mind like mercury, streaming brightly, pooling here and there in thought and then spilling on, eddying through Dickens and faith, the law and Iraq, chamber music and the fear of death.
We were sitting at the plain beech table of Ian McEwan’s Bloomsbury, London apartment, which he shares with his wife, the journalist Annalena McAfee. He wrote much of his latest novel, The Children Act, here and the rest at their country home in Gloucestershire.
McEwan found the inspiration for The Children Act in the judgments of an old friend, Sir Alan Ward, a distinguished High Court judge in Britain. “Judgements are like a neglected sub-genre of literature that are only read by law students and other judges. There was one he told me about which was a microcosm, a sort of perfect playing field between the secular imagination and sincerely held religious belief. This answers concerns I’ve had over many years in which these things are opposed, faith and reason.”
After a dozen or so novels does it get any easier?
“No, it certainly doesn’t. It always feels like the first novel. I’m a very slow starter and I drift into things. In between books I tend to leave a gap and just follow my nose. I’m often not aware that I’m researching things, catching up on reading, pursuing certain interests and then suddenly something clicks – or less resounding than a click, more like a thud, an extended dull thud – and something begins to take shape. When Alan told me this story I thought that is a novel. It has intellectual and moral and emotional drama.”
The case was of a Jehovah’s Witness teenager suffering from leukaemia who declines a blood transfusion which could save his life, with the backing of his devout parents. As he is three months short of his 18th birthday the hospital turns to the courts to force him to have the treatment.
McEwan explores the story through the character of Fiona Maye, a leading High Court judge in the Family Division. Almost 60, she is wise, of course, praised for her elegant judgements that are “almost ironic, almost warm”. The Lord Chief Justice himself, we are told, is heard to murmur of her: “Godly distance, devilish understanding, and still beautiful.”
She brings her good, reasoned sense to bear on the baleful dramas in her courtroom, where “Loving promises were denied or rewritten, once easy companions became artful combatants crouching behind counsel, oblivious to costs.” She rules astutely, compassionately.
But when, on a Sunday night, Fiona receives a request for an emergency hearing from the hospital in question, we find her in the midst of her own crisis. Her husband Jack, a professor of ancient history, has asked her permission to have a fling. “Before I drop dead, I want one big passionate affair. Ecstasy, almost blacking out with the thrill of it. Remember that?”
Not surprisingly, Fiona is livid. They are acutely cultured people – her idea of the ideal birthday present is to learn to play a Bach partita for him – and it has been a loving, tender, civilised marriage. She dwells on her childlessness, her advancing years and dreads the pity of others at her changed fortunes. Now she, too, will be “down there swimming with the desolate tide” of the cases that wash up at her bench. She shows him the door and turns her attention to the case of Adam Henry.
In court she listens evenly to counsel’s arguments and to Adam’s parents and social worker. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the Bible expressly forbids “mixing your own blood with the blood of an animal or another human being.” Each side is convincing, and on a whim she decides to go to the hospital and meet the boy himself.
She finds a beautiful young man, with “crescents of bruised purple fading delicately to white under the eyes”. He is playful, coquettish even, taken with the idea of being a tragic poet. Fiona’s quiet conversation with him is masterfully drawn and what will spool out from this meeting between them has all the drama and suasive power we have come to expect from McEwan.
He is famously atheist. “Dogma, or sincere belief, however you want to see it, is very strong, just as ideology is very strong. People can act seemingly right against their own interests. To see a child die for some rather peculiar – or particular – interpretation of some dietary restrictions in the Bible. How could a Stone Age text forbid you a transfusion? Very odd. Very odd to me.”
The Children Act is a slim book, almost a novella, but like those children’s toys, the small dinosaurs that you drop in a glass of water and which balloon overnight, it dilates with ideas about belief and fidelity, culture and love, and gives the reader much pause. This being McEwan, there is no neat knotting-up at the end, but it is immensely satisfying nonetheless.
“I think of the novel as a sort of extended form of investigation of moral issues, rather than delivering a sort of homily at the end. That’s too limiting. Novelists generally live in a world of investigation rather than verdicts.”
If, in this age, religion no longer transmits wisdom, does he believe literature can do that?
“I do. I’ve been to funerals where it’s not the Bible that’s referred to but poetry and fiction. Paragraphs from Middlemarch, poems of Seamus Heaney. I think the accumulations of what people have written in the literatures of the world amount to more than all the holy books. It’s a wonderful cumulative project. It’s the great machine of understanding others.”
At the door, the man routinely referred to as one of our greatest living novelists beams up at the burnished afternoon. He is bouncing, almost, having just heard that his first grandchild has been born. Time to leave a gap and follow his nose until the next dull thud heralds the start of another immaculate novel.
Follow Michele on Twitter @michelemagwood
Listen to her interview with Ian McEwan on Thursday, September 25th, at 2pm on TM LIVE
Book details
- The Children Act by Ian McEwan
EAN: 9780224101998
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