Feeling light-headed
Reason abandons a judge in Ian McEwan’s latest
Aforte of English novelist Ian McEwan is his convincing depiction of the ebb and flow of human emotions under stress. This skill can be demonstrated in a trivial episode, such as an emotionally fraught game of squash between two men in his novel Saturday, or as potentially lethal an episode as the encounter between a woman and two large and vicious dogs in his novella Black Dogs.
In The Children Act there are two main stressful events undergone by the protagonist, a family court judge in London named Fiona Maye. The first is when her husband, Jack, a university professor, announces that he is engaged, or is about to be engaged, in an adulterous affair with a younger woman. This sudden blow triggers within Fiona an unstoppable flow of thought and emotion, a flow captured and described with complete conviction by McEwan. One of the most painful aspects of this affair, for example, is that it transforms her from a “secular god,” dispensing judgment — a scrupulously rational arbiter of fate over the hapless petitioners before her bench — to someone on a par with these same petitioners.
The second stressful event involves a 17-year-old boy suffering from leukemia, in urgent need of a blood transfusion. He and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, a sect which prohibits such transfusions for religious reasons. The hospital, in turn, is asking the court to set aside their wishes on the grounds that the boy will likely die without the transfusions, and that he is too young to decide for himself on the matter.
These conflicting imperatives fall to Fiona to resolve. The arguments she hears, pro and con transfusion, are the most compelling part of the novel — McEwan does full justice to each party’s case in this contest between faith and medical science, the physical welfare of the child versus his spiritual welfare. Fiona also visits the boy in the hospital to help her determine his competency and the depths of his feeling about the question of his life and death. There she finds a sweetly innocent, very engaging young man, in love with poetry and music.
This is not the second stressful event, however — Fiona has little difficulty coming to a decision. The second event is a moment’s indiscretion concerning the boy, which shakes Fiona’s carefully constructed world of legal rules and sound thinking to its core.
This indiscretion is the more unsettling given that Fiona Maye and her husband, like many of McEwan’s protagonists, are portrayed as exemplary members of society. Fiona, like the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne in Saturday, is a highly trained professional, a true guardian of the welfare of her fellow Londoners. Her private life — the couple have no children — is extremely comfortable and cultivated, Fiona being free to devote herself to playing classical music on the piano.
If t here is any i r ony attached to their lives — such as the irony of Fiona, the voice of reason, plunged into her own sea of marital woes and behaving out of cold stone fury — they are usually quick to recognize it. Usually, I say, but self-discovery can be endless. “She didn’t understand her own behaviour,” McEwan writes at one point. Is it possible, for example, that without her legal papers, “she would not know what to do with herself ?”
The point is McEwan does not patronize these people. At the same time, McEwan makes no apologies for their firmly this-worldly perspective. “I’m 59,” Jack pleads with Fiona. “This is my last shot. I’ve yet to hear evidence for an afterlife.” If this life is all we have, why not seize any opportunities for gratified passion? Conversely, he need not fear the sulphur pits of Hell for violating the sixth commandment.
Nor is there any call for radical social and political change in the world of the Mayes. Jack may be a little too concerned about making money from books he’s writing, but there’s no sense in the novel that his books — a biography of Julius Caesar, a text of Virgil’s poetry — are foolish or useless enterprises. Fiona may be a little bit smug in her reputation for the literary quality of her judgments — one such judgment, regarding a horribly grotesque case of Siamese twins, is widely regarded within her world of the courtroom as “elegant and correct.” At the same time, she does not forget the potential of the law to foster monstrous wrongs. One particular case involving a woman stupidly and wrongly convicted of murder and thereby driven
McEwan does not patronize these people, and makes no apologies for their firmly this-worldly perspective
“to despair and death,” sickens Fiona. “The law, however much Fiona loved it,” McEwan writes, “was at its worst not an ass but a snake, a poisonous snake.”
This sense is reinforced in the novel by the case of a lawyer infuriated by an unjust decision against his client. The guilty verdict seems to have more to do with class prejudice than with any sort of equity. But again there is no sense in the novel that the system as a whole is not working, or that the legal system needs serious reform. Her work leads Fiona to the conclusion that “kindness is the essential human ingredient,” and she tries to remember that, despite hints, in McEwan’s words, “that her developing taste for the patient, exacting digression” is leading to pedantry.
As for larger spiritual concerns, Fiona writes in a judgment, “This court takes no view of the afterlife.” Jack will have to take his chances with that.
Like all of McEwan’s work, The Children Act (named after an act of Parliament) is a very readable narrative, fortified with suspense and displaying a taste for the lurid. It is his 16th novel, in a series that bears some resemblance to a contemporary English version of Balzac’s Human Comedy.