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The Children of Men
Award-winning P.D. James, one of the masters of British crime fiction, plots this atmospheric and disturbing novel in the year 2021. Children of Men is a brilliant mystery possessing all of the qualities which distinguish P.D. James as a novelist.
Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiatt, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably, as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.
PD James is the world's pre-eminent crime writer, most famous for her Adam Dalgliesh mysteries and for her bestselling titles Death Comes to Pemberley and The Murder Room. Children of Men was adapted into a hit film in 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarn the film starred Clive Owen, Michael Caine and Julianne Moore.
292 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1992
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57115 people want to read
About the author
P.D. James
320 books3,250 followersP. D. James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died November 27, 2014, Oxford), British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.
The daughter of a middle-grade civil servant, James grew up in the university town of Cambridge. Her formal education, however, ended at age 16 because of lack of funds, and she was thereafter self-educated. In 1941 she married Ernest C.B. White, a medical student and future physician, who returned home from wartime service mentally deranged and spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. To support her family (which included two children), she took work in hospital administration and, after her husband’s death in 1964, became a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. Her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face (1962), introduced Dalgliesh and was followed by six more mysteries before she retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing.
Dalgliesh, James’s master detective who rises from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander, is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. The novels in which he appears are peopled by fully rounded characters, who are civilized, genteel, and motivated. The public resonance created by James’s singular characterization and deployment of classic mystery devices led to most of the novels featuring Dalgliesh being filmed for television. James, who earned the sobriquet “Queen of Crime,” penned 14 Dalgliesh novels, with the last, The Private Patient, appearing in 2008.
James also wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), which centre on Cordelia Gray, a young private detective. The first of these novels was the basis for both a television movie and a short-lived series. James expanded beyond the mystery genre in The Children of Men (1992; film 2006), which explores a dystopian world in which the human race has become infertile. Her final work, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)—a sequel to Pride and Prejudice (1813)—amplifies the class and relationship tensions between Jane Austen’s characters by situating them in the midst of a murder investigation. James’s nonfiction works include The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), a telling of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 written with historian T.A. Critchley, and the insightful Talking About Detective Fiction (2009). Her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, was published in 2000. She was made OBE in 1983 and was named a life peer in 1991.
The daughter of a middle-grade civil servant, James grew up in the university town of Cambridge. Her formal education, however, ended at age 16 because of lack of funds, and she was thereafter self-educated. In 1941 she married Ernest C.B. White, a medical student and future physician, who returned home from wartime service mentally deranged and spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. To support her family (which included two children), she took work in hospital administration and, after her husband’s death in 1964, became a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. Her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face (1962), introduced Dalgliesh and was followed by six more mysteries before she retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing.
Dalgliesh, James’s master detective who rises from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander, is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. The novels in which he appears are peopled by fully rounded characters, who are civilized, genteel, and motivated. The public resonance created by James’s singular characterization and deployment of classic mystery devices led to most of the novels featuring Dalgliesh being filmed for television. James, who earned the sobriquet “Queen of Crime,” penned 14 Dalgliesh novels, with the last, The Private Patient, appearing in 2008.
James also wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), which centre on Cordelia Gray, a young private detective. The first of these novels was the basis for both a television movie and a short-lived series. James expanded beyond the mystery genre in The Children of Men (1992; film 2006), which explores a dystopian world in which the human race has become infertile. Her final work, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)—a sequel to Pride and Prejudice (1813)—amplifies the class and relationship tensions between Jane Austen’s characters by situating them in the midst of a murder investigation. James’s nonfiction works include The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971), a telling of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 written with historian T.A. Critchley, and the insightful Talking About Detective Fiction (2009). Her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, was published in 2000. She was made OBE in 1983 and was named a life peer in 1991.
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April 11, 2012
"Told with P. D. James's trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling"...
I have wanted to read this book for a long time. I loved the movie. I thought it was brilliant, exciting, suspenseful and terrifying all at once. It was everything the book should have been... but was not.
What the book was, unfortunately, was big stretches of yawn interspersed by long-jumps of "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we fucking there yet?" and little bunny-hops of "Oh, that's interesting" moments.
As a dystopia, the world that James created is plausible, perhaps even likely, should the events that changed the world come about in our own reality. Mens' little swimmers forgot their floaties, and thus the race is more of a floundering then a sinking, then a dying off. No more babies. Wonder if anyone checked where the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement people were in Omega year 1995, eh? Sprinkling a little sumthin' in the water? Hmmmm?
I digress. The world... plausible. But I just really couldn't bring myself to care. It was hard to give a crap about really anyone in this book, including humanity in general. I didn't care about the fact that the whole world was dying because I didn't give a shit that the individuals shown in the book were dying. Everyone was so despicable and shitty. Julian was maybe the only exception, but despite her desire to change things and do something better for the world, I still just didn't care.
I'm supposed to care about a world when the lens I get to see it through is so covered in shit I don't even want to stand downwind of it? A man whose only thought for his 27-years-dead toddler daughter is that she was an inconvenience anyway? Really? He can't find ONE positive thing about his own daughter in almost 30 years?
I liked Theo Faron in the movie. He was maybe selfish, maybe not the nicest guy, but he was real, and I liked him. His book character? Not so much. I found it very, very hard to even muster up a little meh for him, even when he comes around to the "good guys'" team. You know... until he takes the One Ring for himself, that is.
Ugh, and don't even get me started on Theo's diaries.
You kind of expect historians to be a little dull. Introverted, selfish asshole historians to be duller still. But wow. Seriously, fucking wow, were Theo's diary entries duller than shit. Do I need a minute by minute recap of how he spent his adolescent summers at his cousin's estate house? No. Please no. Please. Establish the history in a flashback, in a home video, in a memory, in... something, ANYTHING, other than the diary entries of man who has nothing at all better to do with the unlimited vocabulary, time and Bic pens at his disposal than write the most trivial boring bullshit diary that will never ever be read ever. Except by me.
FML.
This book gets this many
stars.
I have wanted to read this book for a long time. I loved the movie. I thought it was brilliant, exciting, suspenseful and terrifying all at once. It was everything the book should have been... but was not.
What the book was, unfortunately, was big stretches of yawn interspersed by long-jumps of "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we fucking there yet?" and little bunny-hops of "Oh, that's interesting" moments.
As a dystopia, the world that James created is plausible, perhaps even likely, should the events that changed the world come about in our own reality. Mens' little swimmers forgot their floaties, and thus the race is more of a floundering then a sinking, then a dying off. No more babies. Wonder if anyone checked where the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement people were in Omega year 1995, eh? Sprinkling a little sumthin' in the water? Hmmmm?
I digress. The world... plausible. But I just really couldn't bring myself to care. It was hard to give a crap about really anyone in this book, including humanity in general. I didn't care about the fact that the whole world was dying because I didn't give a shit that the individuals shown in the book were dying. Everyone was so despicable and shitty. Julian was maybe the only exception, but despite her desire to change things and do something better for the world, I still just didn't care.
I'm supposed to care about a world when the lens I get to see it through is so covered in shit I don't even want to stand downwind of it? A man whose only thought for his 27-years-dead toddler daughter is that she was an inconvenience anyway? Really? He can't find ONE positive thing about his own daughter in almost 30 years?
I liked Theo Faron in the movie. He was maybe selfish, maybe not the nicest guy, but he was real, and I liked him. His book character? Not so much. I found it very, very hard to even muster up a little meh for him, even when he comes around to the "good guys'" team. You know... until he takes the One Ring for himself, that is.
Ugh, and don't even get me started on Theo's diaries.
You kind of expect historians to be a little dull. Introverted, selfish asshole historians to be duller still. But wow. Seriously, fucking wow, were Theo's diary entries duller than shit. Do I need a minute by minute recap of how he spent his adolescent summers at his cousin's estate house? No. Please no. Please. Establish the history in a flashback, in a home video, in a memory, in... something, ANYTHING, other than the diary entries of man who has nothing at all better to do with the unlimited vocabulary, time and Bic pens at his disposal than write the most trivial boring bullshit diary that will never ever be read ever. Except by me.
FML.
This book gets this many
stars. 
December 10, 2015
Posted at Shelf Inflicted
I went to the library to spice up my life and came across a display inviting me to go on a blind date with a book. Each one was covered in brown wrapping paper with a big red heart. Underneath the heart was a very brief description. The one I picked up said “Receptive and chilling”.
It was fun driving home with a book I knew absolutely nothing about. I couldn’t wait to get it home, pour myself a glass of wine, strip off its cover, and learn its secrets. To my disappointment, it was The Children of Men, a book I read shortly after it came out. I liked it well enough at the time, but found that years later nothing stood out for me but the Quietus and the feral Painted Faces. I saw the film around 2007 and can’t remember a single thing about it, only that there was more action and less reflection and introspection.
In 2021, the world is ending quietly. No babies have been born since 1995, the last one killed when he was just 25. People are getting older, trapped in routines, becoming resigned. Infrastructure is falling apart from lack of maintenance and small towns are losing their population.
Theodore Faron is a history professor who no longer has any children of his own and none to teach. He is keeping a journal to record the last half of his life and lives a solitary existence until he meets Julian and a small group of people who desire to revolt against the dictatorship of England, whose leader happens to be Theo’s cousin Xan.
When I first read this book, I found the characters largely bland and uninteresting and much preferred the second half when Theo and the five revolutionaries were on the run.
Now, I found I rather enjoyed reading about Theo’s childhood and relationship with Xan, his failed marriage, the people he encounters, his feelings about the events going on around him, and the gradual process of his falling in love.
“A failed marriage is the most humiliating confirmation of the transitory seduction of the flesh. Lovers can explore every line, every curve and hollow, of the beloved’s body, can together reach the height of inexpressible ecstasy; yet how little it matters when love or lust at last dies and we are left with disputed possessions, lawyers’ bills, the sad detritus of the lumber-room, when the house chosen, furnished, possessed with enthusiasm and hope has become a prison, when faces are set in lines of peevish resentment and bodies no longer desired are observed in all their imperfections with a dispassionate and disenchanted eye.”
I enjoyed this book much more with the second reading. Maybe it’s because I am now Theo’s age and can understand his feelings much better. Or maybe I have more patience and prefer rich characterization and lovely descriptions of countryside to lots of mindless action. Now that the book is fresh in my mind, I’ll think about watching the film again.
June 16, 2016
I have come to realize, years after writing this review, that is it is marked by a naïve Lamarckism--a belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics. But I'll let it stand as a reminder of my errors, and how much I have learned since then.
---
I never was much of a genre reader but at some time in my middle years I was assailed by a love of dystopias. There's nothing like a vivid tale of the world ending to truly set me at my ease. It did not occur to me until I read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium why dystopic narratives were so satisfying on an almost physiological level. I realized it was a hardwired need, evolved by centuries of my whack-job millenarian forebears, for apocalyptic solace. These eschatological needs are still within me and going strong. They include a desire for angels as messengers of the apocalypse, an irrational longing for the rewards of paradise, and an overwhelming desire to witness those less pure of heart than myself receive their fiery comeuppance.
Fortunately, unlike my forebears, I have not had to run riot over the Bavarian countryside acting out my delusions by stringing up debauched clerics and those belonging to the so-called hostile faiths, but have been able to sublimate the evolutionary inanities through art. I am happy to report that The Children of Men does at times rise to that exalted level.
Here is a world in which men have gone sterile. You just can't find fertile semen anymore. Some women, denied their customary reproductive roles, have gone bonkers. They end up baptizing cats and dolls and such. (Other women, one imagines, are dancing a jig so tickled are they to never again have to risk another perineum tear.) One thing I liked was the image of the world preparing to go on without mankind. For in the vacuum left by the end of human fertility all the other flora and fauna seem to redouble their efforts.
Our hero is Theodore Faron. A sardonic at times bitter retired professor of history at Oxford--there are no more children to teach--who ran his daughter over in a tragic accident many years ago. His wife never forgave him, then she started banging this rugby player half her age. Theo happens to be cousin to the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiatt, a childhood friend, who is running a thuggish police state. During the first half of the story the state is in the process of redistributing its thinning population to central locations for purposes of making delivery of services easier. At least that's the excuse. The first half is all clandestine meetings of the dissidents and background into Theo's boyhood relationship to Xan.
Then it turns into a road story not without parallels, though fleeting, to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Though, it should be emphasized, this is not a post-apocalyptic world going-out-with-a-bang novel, like The Road, but rather a civilization fizzling-out-with-a-whimper story. Nevertheless there is sufficient violence and craziness and survivalist mentalities employed to keep everyone happy. There is an intimation of the second coming, personal betrayal of the basest sort, and headlong hysterical flight. There is an elegant density of diction that is consistent throughout, and I found that the descriptive sections, especially in the action-packed second half of the book, touch on the beautiful. Highly recommended for thriller lovers. Mandatory for lovers of dystopic fictions.
---
I never was much of a genre reader but at some time in my middle years I was assailed by a love of dystopias. There's nothing like a vivid tale of the world ending to truly set me at my ease. It did not occur to me until I read Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium why dystopic narratives were so satisfying on an almost physiological level. I realized it was a hardwired need, evolved by centuries of my whack-job millenarian forebears, for apocalyptic solace. These eschatological needs are still within me and going strong. They include a desire for angels as messengers of the apocalypse, an irrational longing for the rewards of paradise, and an overwhelming desire to witness those less pure of heart than myself receive their fiery comeuppance.
Fortunately, unlike my forebears, I have not had to run riot over the Bavarian countryside acting out my delusions by stringing up debauched clerics and those belonging to the so-called hostile faiths, but have been able to sublimate the evolutionary inanities through art. I am happy to report that The Children of Men does at times rise to that exalted level.
Here is a world in which men have gone sterile. You just can't find fertile semen anymore. Some women, denied their customary reproductive roles, have gone bonkers. They end up baptizing cats and dolls and such. (Other women, one imagines, are dancing a jig so tickled are they to never again have to risk another perineum tear.) One thing I liked was the image of the world preparing to go on without mankind. For in the vacuum left by the end of human fertility all the other flora and fauna seem to redouble their efforts.
Our hero is Theodore Faron. A sardonic at times bitter retired professor of history at Oxford--there are no more children to teach--who ran his daughter over in a tragic accident many years ago. His wife never forgave him, then she started banging this rugby player half her age. Theo happens to be cousin to the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiatt, a childhood friend, who is running a thuggish police state. During the first half of the story the state is in the process of redistributing its thinning population to central locations for purposes of making delivery of services easier. At least that's the excuse. The first half is all clandestine meetings of the dissidents and background into Theo's boyhood relationship to Xan.
Then it turns into a road story not without parallels, though fleeting, to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Though, it should be emphasized, this is not a post-apocalyptic world going-out-with-a-bang novel, like The Road, but rather a civilization fizzling-out-with-a-whimper story. Nevertheless there is sufficient violence and craziness and survivalist mentalities employed to keep everyone happy. There is an intimation of the second coming, personal betrayal of the basest sort, and headlong hysterical flight. There is an elegant density of diction that is consistent throughout, and I found that the descriptive sections, especially in the action-packed second half of the book, touch on the beautiful. Highly recommended for thriller lovers. Mandatory for lovers of dystopic fictions.
August 17, 2015
This novel seriously freaked me out when I read it. I actually sat in stunned and depressed contemplation at my own lack of children and the decisions I believed I held dear at the time.
I didn't care to bring children into this world, and at the time, I hated the world pretty much entirely, so I got struck against the back of my head after reading this and I haven't really been the same, since.
The novel took me on a very disturbing ride with the ultimate death of humanity by way of sterility. The most powerful aspect of the novel was the people's reactions, how their worldviews veered off in strange ways.
Suicides were all very well and obvious, but I think I enjoyed the other paths the mind took in reaction.
I still can't believe that the novel had the effect of changing my mind about my life. I like to consider myself pretty well-read and aware, but sometimes a huge kick in the head can come out of nowhere. I changed my mind. I wanted to live. I wanted children. I hadn't wanted children before.
Very big life choice, no? Maybe it says more about me than the novel. I don't really know. It did surprise the hell out of me.
I didn't care to bring children into this world, and at the time, I hated the world pretty much entirely, so I got struck against the back of my head after reading this and I haven't really been the same, since.
The novel took me on a very disturbing ride with the ultimate death of humanity by way of sterility. The most powerful aspect of the novel was the people's reactions, how their worldviews veered off in strange ways.
Suicides were all very well and obvious, but I think I enjoyed the other paths the mind took in reaction.
I still can't believe that the novel had the effect of changing my mind about my life. I like to consider myself pretty well-read and aware, but sometimes a huge kick in the head can come out of nowhere. I changed my mind. I wanted to live. I wanted children. I hadn't wanted children before.
Very big life choice, no? Maybe it says more about me than the novel. I don't really know. It did surprise the hell out of me.
April 28, 2017
"Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days."
Despite a riveting premise, I did not enjoy this novel at all.
Children of Men struggled to engage me due to an opening act that lasted for the entirety of book 1 ("The Omega"), an unlikeable protagonist and confused thematic messaging.
THE PLOT
"We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause."
The novel is painfully plodding. Julian, the miracle mother, is not introduced until chapter 6 and the actual action of the novel doesn't occur until past the halfway point. The failure of the novel to properly identify the central plot question results in meandering and self indulgent story telling.
On the periphery of a boring story about a privileged, emotionally dead, intellectual, interesting plot lines are suggested. The harrowing forced suicides of the elderly, exploitive immigration policies, total social ennui.
But these more interesting tangents are buried beneath a punishingly dull tale that eventually reveals itself to be a confused reflection on the corrupting influence of power and, bizarrely, a religious parable.
THE WORLD BUILDING
"You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.”
The world building is by far the strongest aspect of Children of Men. The detailed inclusion of geopolitical, psychological and economic impacts of such a cataclysmic event are well- thought out. A number of more recent dystopian writers could do worse than to study James' sophisticated approach.
Unfortunately, like so much else in this beleaguered novel, the world building is under utilised. Broad swaths of the world building could have been cut out without any impact on the central plot.
THE WRITING
"If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."
The prose was very good. Occasionally even poetic. But so many horrifying scenes were written with a cold detachment that left me distanced from the emotion of the moment.
CHARACTERS
"I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.... I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”
Despite having finished the book just 40 minutes ago when I got to this section for a moment I couldn't remember Theo's name (the protagonist). He was thoroughly unlikeable. I cannot understand why he was the character chosen as the protagonist. Why, in a story about infertility and a miracle birth, do you position a stuffy, unfriendly man who accidentally killed his only offspring, as the central protagonist?
Furthermore, almost all of the side characters were unpleasant. Julian was an insipid, walking womb and mouth piece for "true faith". Xan was a power drunk, closeted homosexual. Nobody in this novel inspired admiration or affection.
THEMES
The Purpose of Life
"Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”
In her personal life James is a deeply conservative Christian. So it is unsurprising that Children of Men, often described as her best work, explores the premise from a slanted lense. Much effort is expended to compare commercialised, "end of days" religions with Theo and Julian's authentic, private beliefs.
The novel is at times scathing of many modern practices; worship of the body, science as god... but James muddies her message by trying to communicate a message by subsuming it beneath the power struggle between two men.
She would have done better to write a more open religious parable. It might not have been to my taste but it would have felt coherent.
A Meditation on Power
"A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.”
Upon finishing the novel I was left with a sense of squeamish disquiet regarding Theo's triumph over Xan. Theo had overcome spiritual inertia and successfully protected Julian and her son, the saviour of humanity.
However, rather then end the novel on this hopeful note James has Theo take control of the country and murder his cousin. This outcome is meant to be ambivalent and I can't understand why it was included. It felt like Children of Men was telling two oxymoronic stories.
Spiritual, Emotional and Physical Fertility
"Don’t romanticize her. She may be the most important woman in the world but she isn’t the Virgin Mary. The child she is carrying is still the child of a whore.”
In a novel that centred on fertility, James managed to make every female character ridiculous. Whether she was describing the deranged women who christened kittens and nurture dolls, repulsive senile elderly women, psychopathic, ugly female leaders or the devout but brainless Julian... they all felt like paper thin shells.
Devoid of real characterisation and agency.
Much has been made of the fact that it is defunct sperm that causes the fertility crisis, as if on this fact alone, the novel should be considered a feminist win. That assertion is frankly ridiculous.
I'm baffled by the decision to frame a story of fertility around the memoirs of a privileged male academic who dislikes children, remembers his own daughter with jealousy and guilt, and feels he has suffered no personal loss due to the fertility crisis.
It isn't that it can't be done, or that it offends my political principles, it is just that it strips so much potential depth and meaning from the story.
Overall, I regret reading it and wouldn't recommend it, although readers who enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or The Handmaid's Tale (both excellent books with similar themes) may find something to enjoy here.
Despite a riveting premise, I did not enjoy this novel at all.
Children of Men struggled to engage me due to an opening act that lasted for the entirety of book 1 ("The Omega"), an unlikeable protagonist and confused thematic messaging.
THE PLOT
"We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause."
The novel is painfully plodding. Julian, the miracle mother, is not introduced until chapter 6 and the actual action of the novel doesn't occur until past the halfway point. The failure of the novel to properly identify the central plot question results in meandering and self indulgent story telling.
On the periphery of a boring story about a privileged, emotionally dead, intellectual, interesting plot lines are suggested. The harrowing forced suicides of the elderly, exploitive immigration policies, total social ennui.
But these more interesting tangents are buried beneath a punishingly dull tale that eventually reveals itself to be a confused reflection on the corrupting influence of power and, bizarrely, a religious parable.
THE WORLD BUILDING
"You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.”
The world building is by far the strongest aspect of Children of Men. The detailed inclusion of geopolitical, psychological and economic impacts of such a cataclysmic event are well- thought out. A number of more recent dystopian writers could do worse than to study James' sophisticated approach.
Unfortunately, like so much else in this beleaguered novel, the world building is under utilised. Broad swaths of the world building could have been cut out without any impact on the central plot.
THE WRITING
"If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."
The prose was very good. Occasionally even poetic. But so many horrifying scenes were written with a cold detachment that left me distanced from the emotion of the moment.
CHARACTERS
"I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.... I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.”
Despite having finished the book just 40 minutes ago when I got to this section for a moment I couldn't remember Theo's name (the protagonist). He was thoroughly unlikeable. I cannot understand why he was the character chosen as the protagonist. Why, in a story about infertility and a miracle birth, do you position a stuffy, unfriendly man who accidentally killed his only offspring, as the central protagonist?
Furthermore, almost all of the side characters were unpleasant. Julian was an insipid, walking womb and mouth piece for "true faith". Xan was a power drunk, closeted homosexual. Nobody in this novel inspired admiration or affection.
THEMES
The Purpose of Life
"Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.”
In her personal life James is a deeply conservative Christian. So it is unsurprising that Children of Men, often described as her best work, explores the premise from a slanted lense. Much effort is expended to compare commercialised, "end of days" religions with Theo and Julian's authentic, private beliefs.
The novel is at times scathing of many modern practices; worship of the body, science as god... but James muddies her message by trying to communicate a message by subsuming it beneath the power struggle between two men.
She would have done better to write a more open religious parable. It might not have been to my taste but it would have felt coherent.
A Meditation on Power
"A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.”
Upon finishing the novel I was left with a sense of squeamish disquiet regarding Theo's triumph over Xan. Theo had overcome spiritual inertia and successfully protected Julian and her son, the saviour of humanity.
However, rather then end the novel on this hopeful note James has Theo take control of the country and murder his cousin. This outcome is meant to be ambivalent and I can't understand why it was included. It felt like Children of Men was telling two oxymoronic stories.
Spiritual, Emotional and Physical Fertility
"Don’t romanticize her. She may be the most important woman in the world but she isn’t the Virgin Mary. The child she is carrying is still the child of a whore.”
In a novel that centred on fertility, James managed to make every female character ridiculous. Whether she was describing the deranged women who christened kittens and nurture dolls, repulsive senile elderly women, psychopathic, ugly female leaders or the devout but brainless Julian... they all felt like paper thin shells.
Devoid of real characterisation and agency.
Much has been made of the fact that it is defunct sperm that causes the fertility crisis, as if on this fact alone, the novel should be considered a feminist win. That assertion is frankly ridiculous.
I'm baffled by the decision to frame a story of fertility around the memoirs of a privileged male academic who dislikes children, remembers his own daughter with jealousy and guilt, and feels he has suffered no personal loss due to the fertility crisis.
It isn't that it can't be done, or that it offends my political principles, it is just that it strips so much potential depth and meaning from the story.
Overall, I regret reading it and wouldn't recommend it, although readers who enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or The Handmaid's Tale (both excellent books with similar themes) may find something to enjoy here.
January 9, 2024
3 🌞🌞🌞
Posiblemente, el hecho de haber leído la novela tantos años después de su publicación ha hecho que no me haya llamado tanto la atención como cuando se publicó hace ya más de 20 años. Y también influye que acabo de ver la película de Cuarón del 2006, y la he encontrado mucho mejor adaptada al relato que la obra de PD James. Y eso que la película está bastante distanciada de la novela, o quizás mismamente por eso.
De las dos partes de la novela me quedo con la primera. La segunda (la escapada y persecución), se me antoja bastante floja. En cualquier caso, una distopía a tener en cuenta, pero bastante lejos de las mejores obras que se han publicado hasta la fecha.
December 13, 2016
Re-read for post-apocalyptic book club.
I liked this book better, the second time around. I read this the first time quite a while ago, and I think perhaps my age has something to do with the difference in perceptions. It's certainly a piece geared toward older readers. Although it contains violence and tension, it's slow-moving, with a quiet, elegiac feel.
Our narrator, Theo, a lonely academic, is the cousin of the Warden of England. The upheaval of the world's current situation has allowed the Warden, Xan, to seize absolute power. The "current situation" is that no children have been born for over two decades, and no others are expected to be born. Humanity is facing its end.
However, largely, life goes on as per usual, although with fading hope and increasing ennui. Most citizens, concerned with their daily comfort, do not perceive the iron fist concealed within the Warden's velvet glove. Even Theo doesn't see the Warden as any more than the acquaintance whom he used to spend school holidays with, when they were both boys.
But then, Theo is contacted by a tiny group of dissidents with a list of grievances they'd like him to bring to his cousin's attention. And gradually, they win him over to their point of view. (It doesn't hurt that one of them is an intriguingly attractive woman.) The likelihood is that Theo's sympathies won't make any difference. The Warden is in love with power, and not amenable to making any significant changes.
But then, a shocking revelation is made: the intriguing dissident is pregnant.
Where the book takes it from here is into a complex and insightful exploration of human dynamics. It's full of religious allegory, but certainly does not demand that the reader have 'faith' in order to appreciate its depiction of how religious people might behave in the given situation. (They do a lot of dumb and illogical things within the course of this book, but I found it all utterly believable.) And it's more than that: it's about how we see people vs. how they are, about love, loyalty and betrayal, about guilt and redemption, and of course, the seductive nature of power and the erosion of ideals.
I recently read 'The Book of the Unnamed Midwife' and thought that it reminded me of this book (after all, how many post-apocalyptic midwives in a world affected by universal sterility are there in fiction?) but upon re-reading, it's more divergent than I recalled (perhaps the movie version, which is quite different, was beclouding my memories of the book.)
I liked this book better, the second time around. I read this the first time quite a while ago, and I think perhaps my age has something to do with the difference in perceptions. It's certainly a piece geared toward older readers. Although it contains violence and tension, it's slow-moving, with a quiet, elegiac feel.
Our narrator, Theo, a lonely academic, is the cousin of the Warden of England. The upheaval of the world's current situation has allowed the Warden, Xan, to seize absolute power. The "current situation" is that no children have been born for over two decades, and no others are expected to be born. Humanity is facing its end.
However, largely, life goes on as per usual, although with fading hope and increasing ennui. Most citizens, concerned with their daily comfort, do not perceive the iron fist concealed within the Warden's velvet glove. Even Theo doesn't see the Warden as any more than the acquaintance whom he used to spend school holidays with, when they were both boys.
But then, Theo is contacted by a tiny group of dissidents with a list of grievances they'd like him to bring to his cousin's attention. And gradually, they win him over to their point of view. (It doesn't hurt that one of them is an intriguingly attractive woman.) The likelihood is that Theo's sympathies won't make any difference. The Warden is in love with power, and not amenable to making any significant changes.
But then, a shocking revelation is made: the intriguing dissident is pregnant.
Where the book takes it from here is into a complex and insightful exploration of human dynamics. It's full of religious allegory, but certainly does not demand that the reader have 'faith' in order to appreciate its depiction of how religious people might behave in the given situation. (They do a lot of dumb and illogical things within the course of this book, but I found it all utterly believable.) And it's more than that: it's about how we see people vs. how they are, about love, loyalty and betrayal, about guilt and redemption, and of course, the seductive nature of power and the erosion of ideals.
I recently read 'The Book of the Unnamed Midwife' and thought that it reminded me of this book (after all, how many post-apocalyptic midwives in a world affected by universal sterility are there in fiction?) but upon re-reading, it's more divergent than I recalled (perhaps the movie version, which is quite different, was beclouding my memories of the book.)
January 6, 2014
I read this novel after I saw the movie, and discovered this novel is one of the rare exceptions where the movie is better than the novel. It's not that it was badly written. It's just that the author had the wrong focus.
The novel is set in a near future where humanity has lost the ability to have children. Worldwide sterility has persisted for so long that an entire generation has grown up without any children at all. England has become a dictatorship ruled by Xan Lyppiatt. The main character is Dr. Theodore "Theo" Faron, who becomes embroiled in a conflict between a dissident group called the Five Fishes and Xan, his childhood friend and cousin. Along the way, Theo discovers one of the radicals is pregnant with the first unborn child in decades.
I know it's unfair to compare a novel is to a movie, but I thought the movie's focus on the implications of a world without children worked well. The novel spent too much time on the politics of the dystopian England. It seemed like P.D. James became fascinated with how someone becomes a dictator. There's a lengthy account of how Xan grew up and ultimately rose to power, which I didn't care about at all. The novel eventually boils down to a discussion on power and the abuse of power. Meanwhile, the story of a childless world became pushed into the background. Honestly, I think P.D. James could have cut out the sterility angle of the novel, and ended up with the same book.
That's not to say it was entirely ignored. The novel does delve deeper into the building of the childless world. One of my favorite passages described how some infertile women had been driven insane, and treated dolls as real children. I wish that part had been in the movie.
The Children of Men is a good novel held back from becoming a great novel.
The novel is set in a near future where humanity has lost the ability to have children. Worldwide sterility has persisted for so long that an entire generation has grown up without any children at all. England has become a dictatorship ruled by Xan Lyppiatt. The main character is Dr. Theodore "Theo" Faron, who becomes embroiled in a conflict between a dissident group called the Five Fishes and Xan, his childhood friend and cousin. Along the way, Theo discovers one of the radicals is pregnant with the first unborn child in decades.
I know it's unfair to compare a novel is to a movie, but I thought the movie's focus on the implications of a world without children worked well. The novel spent too much time on the politics of the dystopian England. It seemed like P.D. James became fascinated with how someone becomes a dictator. There's a lengthy account of how Xan grew up and ultimately rose to power, which I didn't care about at all. The novel eventually boils down to a discussion on power and the abuse of power. Meanwhile, the story of a childless world became pushed into the background. Honestly, I think P.D. James could have cut out the sterility angle of the novel, and ended up with the same book.
That's not to say it was entirely ignored. The novel does delve deeper into the building of the childless world. One of my favorite passages described how some infertile women had been driven insane, and treated dolls as real children. I wish that part had been in the movie.
The Children of Men is a good novel held back from becoming a great novel.
October 6, 2019
Now I realise I read the book before the movie was in the cinemas! great story, impressive and a creepy view on a dystopian future. I love the Dalgliesh stories too.
October 20, 2023
3.5 stars
Christian lit dressed up as dystopian sci-fi.
As a PD James fan, I'd been looking forward to reading her one sci-fi novel for some time. The writing, descriptions, narration and characterisation are all up to James' usual standard - that is, excellent - but once I figured out what the story was *actually* about, my interest waned greatly.
Nowhere is the novel marketed as Christian fiction, which it certainly is.
The England 25 years after the last baby has been born that James conjures is more alluded to than shown, which is a shame. I'd have liked more about how England was actually run, but world-building clearly isn't the point of the novel.
The point is the retelling of the birth of Jesus and how the righteous shall be converted, and humanity saved for all time by the birth of the god-child, and the evil, soul-less pagans overcome and their horrid lusts dashed and...yeah yeah, whatever, Vicar.
Interestingly, the pagan evil is embodied by an Oliver Cromwell style character with allusions to the Rump Parliament and the destruction caused by the New Model Army. I'm not sure what that's to symbolise exactly, other than perhaps monarchy vs republic as a Christianity vs heathens type thing. Or maybe the Antichrist's Council? My reading there is admittedly foggy and I bow to the more historically knowledgeable on this point.
As it was, I was fairly unhappy with what otherwise is a rather engaging story, full of action, love, betrayal and murder, with some absolutely lovely descriptions of a humanless natural world.
Surprisingly, though, for being a religious retelling, the message is highly conventional, with no real statement other than supporting orthodoxy in behaviour, intent and blind faith in God. I was hoping for much more, but James is far and away too good of a writer to give less than 3 stars to.
I'll be happy to get back to her mysteries now...
Christian lit dressed up as dystopian sci-fi.
As a PD James fan, I'd been looking forward to reading her one sci-fi novel for some time. The writing, descriptions, narration and characterisation are all up to James' usual standard - that is, excellent - but once I figured out what the story was *actually* about, my interest waned greatly.
Nowhere is the novel marketed as Christian fiction, which it certainly is.
The England 25 years after the last baby has been born that James conjures is more alluded to than shown, which is a shame. I'd have liked more about how England was actually run, but world-building clearly isn't the point of the novel.
The point is the retelling of the birth of Jesus and how the righteous shall be converted, and humanity saved for all time by the birth of the god-child, and the evil, soul-less pagans overcome and their horrid lusts dashed and...yeah yeah, whatever, Vicar.
Interestingly, the pagan evil is embodied by an Oliver Cromwell style character with allusions to the Rump Parliament and the destruction caused by the New Model Army. I'm not sure what that's to symbolise exactly, other than perhaps monarchy vs republic as a Christianity vs heathens type thing. Or maybe the Antichrist's Council? My reading there is admittedly foggy and I bow to the more historically knowledgeable on this point.
As it was, I was fairly unhappy with what otherwise is a rather engaging story, full of action, love, betrayal and murder, with some absolutely lovely descriptions of a humanless natural world.
Surprisingly, though, for being a religious retelling, the message is highly conventional, with no real statement other than supporting orthodoxy in behaviour, intent and blind faith in God. I was hoping for much more, but James is far and away too good of a writer to give less than 3 stars to.
I'll be happy to get back to her mysteries now...
December 25, 2015
Ugh! I don't like the cover of this book (the one showing on this page). Don't get me wrong, I like Clive Owen, and the 2006 movie is not too shabby but it does not have much to do with the original text apart from the basic premise; and Theo the protagonist of the movie is the polar opposite of the novel’s character. The author P.D. James is best known for her crime fiction novels mostly featuring defective detective Adam Dalgliesh who is also a poet. I have only read a couple of these Dalgliesh books and never really cared for them. A “poet-detective” just seems too pretentious and unappealing to me. When I heard that they were filming Children of Men I was intrigued though, I did not expect Ms. James to write a science fiction book worth filming, I thought she was one of those mainstream authors who just want to take a stab at sci-fi without really understanding the genre. Anyway, I first read Children of Men in 2006 shortly before the movie was released because I prefer to read the original source material before watching the movie. I owe P.D. James an apology, she did a stupendous job. That said this book is more “speculative fiction” than sci-fi because there is very little science in it. It is more of a thought experiment where the author explores the social any individual implications of the basic premise, the sort of thing Ursula K. Le Guin excels in.
Children of Men can reasonably be labeled as a cozy apocalypse or even a cozy dystopia. It has a high concept premise where in the year 1995* women all over the world suddenly became infertile. As extinction events go this is a very polite one, but quite alarming when you consider the implication. Imagine the human race slowly winding down with a global aging and declining population. In the UK where the novel is set this leads to general despair and ennui in the middle aged and older age groups and uncontrollable wildness in the youngest generation. The year 1995 is called Omega, and the people born in 1995 are called “Omegas”. These Omegas are generally wild and literally allowed to get away with murder because they may be the last hope for mankind's continuation.
The event of the novel itself takes place in 2021, 26 years after the year of Omega. The protagonist is called Theo Faron, a disillusioned English gentleman who happens to be related to the Warden of England, a position of supreme power, far in excess of the office of Prime Minister or the President. He used to be a close adviser to the Warden until the day he up and left because he could not stomach the abuses of power. At the beginning of the novel he basically spends all his time just pottering around, not needing to do any work. One day he is approached by a girl called Julian who asks him to contact and petition the Warden about various woes of the British society and the outrageous abuses of power. The petition goes badly leading to the birth of a less than competent group of dissidents. Initially the Warden views these dissidents as something of a joke but soon something momentous happens which causes Theo, Julian and her dissident friends to go on the run.
The England P.D. James depicts in this book is a lonely, depressing place where suicide is common, and even encouraged and facilitated by the government. I won't reveal the plot beyond the basic outline already mentioned so far, I do find the book to be very nicely plotted, melancholy, eventually thrilling and the denouement is more than satisfactory. The prose is exquisitely written and makes me want to pick up some more of those Adam Dalgliesh novels just to read more of her beautifully crafted sentences. The main characters are very well drawn, particularly Theo who is very flawed, sympathetic and believable, someone you can really root for. He starts off as a kind of wishy-washy anti-hero:
“I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”
I like how his character gradually transforms by his circumstances as the story progresses. The character of Theo is the polar opposite of the character of the same name portrayed by Clive Owen in the movie version. P.D. James’ Theo is a very polite middle aged and middle class English gentleman, kicking ass and taking names is not in his purview, he is rather awkward and bumbling at times though when push comes to shove he does whatever he has to do.
The dialog is also praise worthy with characters getting burned left and right. The switches between the first person epistolary narrative format and the third person narrative seems a little pointless as the narrative point of view is always restricted to Theo and follows the same linear timeline. Still, I am sure James has her artistic reasons and these switches do not impede the readability of the book at all.
Children of Men is one of my favorite dystopian books alongside 1984, Brave New World, Make Room! Make Room! etc. This sub genre continues to be very popular today, though the modern dystopian novels tend to be teen adventures for some reason. Children of Men is the real McCoy.
_________________
* In my PrintSF sci-fi discussion group I often see someone comment that they don’t want to read “old sci-fi” where the author got their prediction wrong and the future setting of the novel is now the past and these old books are not worth reading because the author was so far off the mark. Well, excuuuuuse me! It is not the job of sci-fi authors to predict the future, the whole point is to speculate and explore the implications. Children of Men is a case in point, P.D. James certainly was not anticipating global infertility to occur 1995 (the book was first published in 1992). This novel – like many great sf novels – is asking “what if”. I shouldn’t mind really, it’s their loss missing out on so many great books but it’s a bee in my bonnet you know.
Children of Men can reasonably be labeled as a cozy apocalypse or even a cozy dystopia. It has a high concept premise where in the year 1995* women all over the world suddenly became infertile. As extinction events go this is a very polite one, but quite alarming when you consider the implication. Imagine the human race slowly winding down with a global aging and declining population. In the UK where the novel is set this leads to general despair and ennui in the middle aged and older age groups and uncontrollable wildness in the youngest generation. The year 1995 is called Omega, and the people born in 1995 are called “Omegas”. These Omegas are generally wild and literally allowed to get away with murder because they may be the last hope for mankind's continuation.
The event of the novel itself takes place in 2021, 26 years after the year of Omega. The protagonist is called Theo Faron, a disillusioned English gentleman who happens to be related to the Warden of England, a position of supreme power, far in excess of the office of Prime Minister or the President. He used to be a close adviser to the Warden until the day he up and left because he could not stomach the abuses of power. At the beginning of the novel he basically spends all his time just pottering around, not needing to do any work. One day he is approached by a girl called Julian who asks him to contact and petition the Warden about various woes of the British society and the outrageous abuses of power. The petition goes badly leading to the birth of a less than competent group of dissidents. Initially the Warden views these dissidents as something of a joke but soon something momentous happens which causes Theo, Julian and her dissident friends to go on the run.
The England P.D. James depicts in this book is a lonely, depressing place where suicide is common, and even encouraged and facilitated by the government. I won't reveal the plot beyond the basic outline already mentioned so far, I do find the book to be very nicely plotted, melancholy, eventually thrilling and the denouement is more than satisfactory. The prose is exquisitely written and makes me want to pick up some more of those Adam Dalgliesh novels just to read more of her beautifully crafted sentences. The main characters are very well drawn, particularly Theo who is very flawed, sympathetic and believable, someone you can really root for. He starts off as a kind of wishy-washy anti-hero:
“I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.”
I like how his character gradually transforms by his circumstances as the story progresses. The character of Theo is the polar opposite of the character of the same name portrayed by Clive Owen in the movie version. P.D. James’ Theo is a very polite middle aged and middle class English gentleman, kicking ass and taking names is not in his purview, he is rather awkward and bumbling at times though when push comes to shove he does whatever he has to do.
The dialog is also praise worthy with characters getting burned left and right. The switches between the first person epistolary narrative format and the third person narrative seems a little pointless as the narrative point of view is always restricted to Theo and follows the same linear timeline. Still, I am sure James has her artistic reasons and these switches do not impede the readability of the book at all.
Children of Men is one of my favorite dystopian books alongside 1984, Brave New World, Make Room! Make Room! etc. This sub genre continues to be very popular today, though the modern dystopian novels tend to be teen adventures for some reason. Children of Men is the real McCoy.
_________________
* In my PrintSF sci-fi discussion group I often see someone comment that they don’t want to read “old sci-fi” where the author got their prediction wrong and the future setting of the novel is now the past and these old books are not worth reading because the author was so far off the mark. Well, excuuuuuse me! It is not the job of sci-fi authors to predict the future, the whole point is to speculate and explore the implications. Children of Men is a case in point, P.D. James certainly was not anticipating global infertility to occur 1995 (the book was first published in 1992). This novel – like many great sf novels – is asking “what if”. I shouldn’t mind really, it’s their loss missing out on so many great books but it’s a bee in my bonnet you know.
January 1, 2026
Children are no longer being born, anywhere on Earth; and the choices that people make when all hope seems lost are at the heart of P.D. James’s 1992 novel The Children of Men. James may be better-known for her detective procedurals, but in this novel she makes a successful foray into the field of dystopian science fiction.
The word “dystopian” fits well here; as this novel begins, humankind faces annihilation. In this instance, however, the instrument of humanity’s destruction is not a nuclear war, or the ravages of a new and incurable disease. Rather, the human race has, suddenly and inexplicably, become infertile. Since no new human beings are being born, there is no need for atomic superweapons or exotic viruses to bring about the apocalypse. All that is needed is time, and eventually the human race will age out of existence, pass from the earth.
As of October 1995, not one new human life has come into the world. 1995 has come to be known as Year Omega, or simply Omega; and in the twenty-six years between Omega and the time in which the novel is set, initial optimism – that surely modern science would find the cause of this worldwide mass infertility, devise a remedy, save the day – has given way to a pervasive pessimism, a grim waiting for the end. It is a slow-motion apocalypse that reminded me of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1957) , in which the people of Southern Hemisphere communities like Melbourne, Australia, knowing that the superpowers of the North have destroyed each other with nuclear weapons, can do nothing other than wait for the clouds of deadly radiation to drift south.
The society of The Children of Men has changed in a variety of ways as an aging population looks ahead to human extinction. Playgrounds and other reminders of children have been removed. The carriages and prams that women wheel along the streets of their towns and cities hold dolls that take the place of the human babies those women never had the chance to bear. Births of kittens and puppies are celebrated as elaborately as births of boys and girls once were. The children of Year Omega, themselves known as “Omegas,” have been pampered and idolized since birth, and seem markedly different, in deportment and behavior, from the rest of the population. There are even gangs of Omegas, known as “Painted Faces,” who roam the countryside and waylay unlucky travelers for use as victims in a bizarre, consciously primitive ritual of human sacrifice. The psychological impact of the slow-motion calamity that is Omega is well emphasized.
I originally posted this review to Goodreads back on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2021, and you will understand why I did so when I quote to you the opening sentence of the novel: “Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days” (p. 3). It was interesting to return to The Children of Men on a New Year’s Day that marked the end of a year that certainly felt apocalyptic. The 2020-21 period was the kind of time when dystopian literature was definitely hitting too close to home.
The character from The Children of Men who writes down that opening sentence is the novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator, Theodore Faron. I say “sometime” because the novel shifts back and forth, somewhat awkwardly, between entries from Faron's diary and third-person narration.
An Oxford don and historian who has spent his career studying the Victorian era, Faron is completely and self-consciously non-heroic. He is a deliberately isolated man, whose marriage ended under tragic circumstances that reflect the novel’s premise of a world without children. He teaches his classes, lives comfortably, and waits for the end.
Yet Faron, for all his self-willed isolation, also has important connections to the political changes that have occurred in Great Britain since Omega. Constitutional monarchy and Parliamentary government have given way to the autocratic rule of a Warden of England; and the Warden, Xan Lyppiatt, who rules with the help of a small and elite Council, is Faron’s cousin.
Under the Warden’s rule, England has a nominal stability that is lacking in much of the rest of the world; but that stability comes at a price. Men are subjected to compulsory testing of their semen, and healthy young women must undergo regular and intrusive examinations of their theoretical fertility. An all-powerful State Security Police monitors citizens carefully, and older people who are no longer productive are expected to participate in a ritual known as the Quietus – a mass suicide that the government claims is voluntary. The state runs sex shops that are meant to enhance the flagging drives of a rapidly aging population.
And the more one reads on, the grimmer England seems under Xan Lyppiatt’s wardenship. The Isle of Man has become an island prison where all those who commit crimes are unceremoniously dumped; like the island of Manhattan in John Carpenter’s science-fiction film Escape from New York (1982), it is completely unregulated and ungoverned, and the inmates of the Man Penal Colony are left to create a hellish little world of their own. People from other, less stable countries are able to come into England as “Sojourners”; but the Sojourners are consigned to do society’s dirtiest work, have virtually no rights, and are subject to deportations when they turn 60 years old and have thereby, in the government’s view, aged out of “usefulness.” I am over 60 years old now, and therefore that last little detail is the sort of thing that makes one think.
Faron’s resolute inaction is disrupted when a young woman named Julian asks him to use his status as Xan’s cousin to speak to the Warden of England. Faron agrees, but Xan dismisses Faron’s pleas for reform, saying, “Your position is no different from the rest of Britain. You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful provided the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose” (p. 99).
What would it be like to have grown up with a close relative who later became a ruthless dictator? It was interesting to hear Faron recall a youthful conversation with Xan, in which Xan expressed an interest in going first into the military and then into politics:
And what he had spoken in that seemingly casual conversation, had it even then been part of a plan? He was right, the army did take him. He became the youngest colonel for 150 years. He still had no political allegiance, no convictions beyond his conviction that what he wanted he should have and that when he set his hand to something he would succeed. After Omega, with the country sunk in apathy, no one wanting to work, services almost at a stop, crime uncontrollable, all hope and ambition lost forever, England had been a ripe plum for his picking. The metaphor was trite but none was more accurate. It had hung there, overripe, rotten; and Xan had only to put out his hand. (p. 152)
Faron subsequently finds himself propelled into a cross-country flight with members of a rag-tag rebel group that calls itself “The Five Fishes,” under circumstances suggesting that humanity’s destruction may not be as inevitable as it once seemed. One woman is pregnant, and therefore represents a hope for humanity's continuance. The later passages of The Children of Men show Faron and "The Five Fishes" travelling across England, trying to keep the woman and her unborn child safe from Xan and his operatives: "His instinct...was to put as many miles as possible between them and London, and to keep to the original plan to hide in deep and remote country. Every mile from London seemed a mile towards safety" (p. 208).
James was a life peer, a devout Anglican who held a Conservative seat in the House of Lords - and I sense some Tory disapproval of trends in the society of her time. At one point, Theo recalls how "During the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie [a popular evangelical preacher of that time] has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign" (p. 50).
Does James think that her England needs to abandon that sort of neo-paganism and get back to the old-time religion? It certainly sounds that way.
Politics aside, however, The Children of Men builds suspense well and is a very fast read. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film adaptation – titled simply Children of Men, omitting the direct article for reasons of which I am not certain – also tells the story well, with Cuarón’s characteristic long takes and a very fine cast (Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam).
Whether you have seen Cuarón’s film or not, James’s novel provides, for devotees of dystopia, a suitably grim journey into a bleak future. I’m just not sure whether the real-life day on which this novel begins was quite the right time at which to be starting this particular book.
The word “dystopian” fits well here; as this novel begins, humankind faces annihilation. In this instance, however, the instrument of humanity’s destruction is not a nuclear war, or the ravages of a new and incurable disease. Rather, the human race has, suddenly and inexplicably, become infertile. Since no new human beings are being born, there is no need for atomic superweapons or exotic viruses to bring about the apocalypse. All that is needed is time, and eventually the human race will age out of existence, pass from the earth.
As of October 1995, not one new human life has come into the world. 1995 has come to be known as Year Omega, or simply Omega; and in the twenty-six years between Omega and the time in which the novel is set, initial optimism – that surely modern science would find the cause of this worldwide mass infertility, devise a remedy, save the day – has given way to a pervasive pessimism, a grim waiting for the end. It is a slow-motion apocalypse that reminded me of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1957) , in which the people of Southern Hemisphere communities like Melbourne, Australia, knowing that the superpowers of the North have destroyed each other with nuclear weapons, can do nothing other than wait for the clouds of deadly radiation to drift south.
The society of The Children of Men has changed in a variety of ways as an aging population looks ahead to human extinction. Playgrounds and other reminders of children have been removed. The carriages and prams that women wheel along the streets of their towns and cities hold dolls that take the place of the human babies those women never had the chance to bear. Births of kittens and puppies are celebrated as elaborately as births of boys and girls once were. The children of Year Omega, themselves known as “Omegas,” have been pampered and idolized since birth, and seem markedly different, in deportment and behavior, from the rest of the population. There are even gangs of Omegas, known as “Painted Faces,” who roam the countryside and waylay unlucky travelers for use as victims in a bizarre, consciously primitive ritual of human sacrifice. The psychological impact of the slow-motion calamity that is Omega is well emphasized.
I originally posted this review to Goodreads back on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2021, and you will understand why I did so when I quote to you the opening sentence of the novel: “Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days” (p. 3). It was interesting to return to The Children of Men on a New Year’s Day that marked the end of a year that certainly felt apocalyptic. The 2020-21 period was the kind of time when dystopian literature was definitely hitting too close to home.
The character from The Children of Men who writes down that opening sentence is the novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator, Theodore Faron. I say “sometime” because the novel shifts back and forth, somewhat awkwardly, between entries from Faron's diary and third-person narration.
An Oxford don and historian who has spent his career studying the Victorian era, Faron is completely and self-consciously non-heroic. He is a deliberately isolated man, whose marriage ended under tragic circumstances that reflect the novel’s premise of a world without children. He teaches his classes, lives comfortably, and waits for the end.
Yet Faron, for all his self-willed isolation, also has important connections to the political changes that have occurred in Great Britain since Omega. Constitutional monarchy and Parliamentary government have given way to the autocratic rule of a Warden of England; and the Warden, Xan Lyppiatt, who rules with the help of a small and elite Council, is Faron’s cousin.
Under the Warden’s rule, England has a nominal stability that is lacking in much of the rest of the world; but that stability comes at a price. Men are subjected to compulsory testing of their semen, and healthy young women must undergo regular and intrusive examinations of their theoretical fertility. An all-powerful State Security Police monitors citizens carefully, and older people who are no longer productive are expected to participate in a ritual known as the Quietus – a mass suicide that the government claims is voluntary. The state runs sex shops that are meant to enhance the flagging drives of a rapidly aging population.
And the more one reads on, the grimmer England seems under Xan Lyppiatt’s wardenship. The Isle of Man has become an island prison where all those who commit crimes are unceremoniously dumped; like the island of Manhattan in John Carpenter’s science-fiction film Escape from New York (1982), it is completely unregulated and ungoverned, and the inmates of the Man Penal Colony are left to create a hellish little world of their own. People from other, less stable countries are able to come into England as “Sojourners”; but the Sojourners are consigned to do society’s dirtiest work, have virtually no rights, and are subject to deportations when they turn 60 years old and have thereby, in the government’s view, aged out of “usefulness.” I am over 60 years old now, and therefore that last little detail is the sort of thing that makes one think.
Faron’s resolute inaction is disrupted when a young woman named Julian asks him to use his status as Xan’s cousin to speak to the Warden of England. Faron agrees, but Xan dismisses Faron’s pleas for reform, saying, “Your position is no different from the rest of Britain. You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful provided the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose” (p. 99).
What would it be like to have grown up with a close relative who later became a ruthless dictator? It was interesting to hear Faron recall a youthful conversation with Xan, in which Xan expressed an interest in going first into the military and then into politics:
And what he had spoken in that seemingly casual conversation, had it even then been part of a plan? He was right, the army did take him. He became the youngest colonel for 150 years. He still had no political allegiance, no convictions beyond his conviction that what he wanted he should have and that when he set his hand to something he would succeed. After Omega, with the country sunk in apathy, no one wanting to work, services almost at a stop, crime uncontrollable, all hope and ambition lost forever, England had been a ripe plum for his picking. The metaphor was trite but none was more accurate. It had hung there, overripe, rotten; and Xan had only to put out his hand. (p. 152)
Faron subsequently finds himself propelled into a cross-country flight with members of a rag-tag rebel group that calls itself “The Five Fishes,” under circumstances suggesting that humanity’s destruction may not be as inevitable as it once seemed. One woman is pregnant, and therefore represents a hope for humanity's continuance. The later passages of The Children of Men show Faron and "The Five Fishes" travelling across England, trying to keep the woman and her unborn child safe from Xan and his operatives: "His instinct...was to put as many miles as possible between them and London, and to keep to the original plan to hide in deep and remote country. Every mile from London seemed a mile towards safety" (p. 208).
James was a life peer, a devout Anglican who held a Conservative seat in the House of Lords - and I sense some Tory disapproval of trends in the society of her time. At one point, Theo recalls how "During the mid-1990s the recognized churches, particularly the Church of England, moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism. Rosie [a popular evangelical preacher of that time] has gone further and has virtually abolished the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross, substituting a golden orb of the sun in glory, like a garish Victorian pub sign" (p. 50).
Does James think that her England needs to abandon that sort of neo-paganism and get back to the old-time religion? It certainly sounds that way.
Politics aside, however, The Children of Men builds suspense well and is a very fast read. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film adaptation – titled simply Children of Men, omitting the direct article for reasons of which I am not certain – also tells the story well, with Cuarón’s characteristic long takes and a very fine cast (Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam).
Whether you have seen Cuarón’s film or not, James’s novel provides, for devotees of dystopia, a suitably grim journey into a bleak future. I’m just not sure whether the real-life day on which this novel begins was quite the right time at which to be starting this particular book.
April 14, 2014
It's been more than a quarter century since a human baby was born on earth. Since that time, the aging population has been just sort of hanging around, preparing itself for the inevitable extinction. Some people develop strong attachments to pets or dolls. Others concentrate on self-improvement with adult education classes. BUT, the secretive and rather sinister council keeps a firm grip on everything, regulating the lives and even the deaths of all citizens.
James tells her tale with third person narration and the use of her main character's journal entries. Though a little jarring at first, it turns out to be an effective mix. Her Theo Faron is a history professor, as staid and stodgy a man as you'll ever meet. It's time somebody changed that stick up his ass and a small group of rebels is just the thing to do it. They approach Theo and ask for his help in essentially overthrowing the council. At first he is reluctant, but then...A MIRACLE OCCURS!!! Suddenly, Theo is lifted out of his humdrum life, and, I swear, actually enjoying himself being on the run and in constant danger.
The author earned my admiration for deftly using a fairly unlikable character as her protagonist AND for coming up with the concept of having the end of the world come not in the form of a fiery violent collision with an asteroid, OR a terrible plague (Calling all zombies!), BUT with the sounds of creaking rocking chairs, squeaky walkers and carping bursitis complaints as earth becomes a world full of cranky old people.
Genius!
James tells her tale with third person narration and the use of her main character's journal entries. Though a little jarring at first, it turns out to be an effective mix. Her Theo Faron is a history professor, as staid and stodgy a man as you'll ever meet. It's time somebody changed that stick up his ass and a small group of rebels is just the thing to do it. They approach Theo and ask for his help in essentially overthrowing the council. At first he is reluctant, but then...A MIRACLE OCCURS!!! Suddenly, Theo is lifted out of his humdrum life, and, I swear, actually enjoying himself being on the run and in constant danger.
The author earned my admiration for deftly using a fairly unlikable character as her protagonist AND for coming up with the concept of having the end of the world come not in the form of a fiery violent collision with an asteroid, OR a terrible plague (Calling all zombies!), BUT with the sounds of creaking rocking chairs, squeaky walkers and carping bursitis complaints as earth becomes a world full of cranky old people.
Genius!
October 17, 2016
3.75
* Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices .
* Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices .
January 28, 2025
In a word? Disappointing. For the vast majority of this book the primary character, who is written sometimes in third person, and sometimes in first (we read his diary) is dry, vindictive, judgmental, indeed hopeless. I was convinced. Other than being an Oxford professor (certainly a worthy achievement) he had no other redeeming qualities that I could appreciate. Not a whisper of kindness seemed retrievable; he was a conceited Trump-like man, albeit with a better vocabulary and a real degree.
When, later, we are to believe he is developing a tenuous humanity, even that is limited to his selfishness. He only “cares” about the woman he lusts after. Classic loser male midlife crisis.
The premise is interesting - there has been no functioning sperm for twenty-five years - and some scenes were well done. The street scene with two troubled women and a ceramic doll being strolled along was downright creepy and understandable - but overall I knew the entire plot, including the denouement, by about page 30. I wish I had been wrong; so many more intriguing possibilities exist.
And the small allegedly seditious group was ridiculous - they had no reason to be together, no plan or credible common goals. Their actions were risible, useless, their failure self-assured. Having spent decades as an activist working in groups that had purpose and found joy: these five seemed the opposite of an affinity group. An entropy group maybe.
about his mother:
“I didn’t love her but I did steal for her. I learned early ... that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.”
about his failed marriage:
“I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”
Ugh.
When, later, we are to believe he is developing a tenuous humanity, even that is limited to his selfishness. He only “cares” about the woman he lusts after. Classic loser male midlife crisis.
The premise is interesting - there has been no functioning sperm for twenty-five years - and some scenes were well done. The street scene with two troubled women and a ceramic doll being strolled along was downright creepy and understandable - but overall I knew the entire plot, including the denouement, by about page 30. I wish I had been wrong; so many more intriguing possibilities exist.
And the small allegedly seditious group was ridiculous - they had no reason to be together, no plan or credible common goals. Their actions were risible, useless, their failure self-assured. Having spent decades as an activist working in groups that had purpose and found joy: these five seemed the opposite of an affinity group. An entropy group maybe.
about his mother:
“I didn’t love her but I did steal for her. I learned early ... that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.”
about his failed marriage:
“I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”
Ugh.
July 14, 2018
Post Apocalyptic, Dystopian, Depressing.
It describes a hopeless, sterile future.
No more children, no more light, no more expectations.
But what if there is a ray of light? What if there is a woman pregnant after more than 25 years without any births on Earth?
“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”
When I read Dystopian fiction, I want to read about hope and expectations that oppose the darkness. This is one of the darknest Dystopian books that I have ever read, but it can certainly change the way you think and it can definitely convince you to reevaluate your life and your aims.
I want to fight for a better future. I want my children and my children's children to fight for a better future. Everything is part of the survival game nevertheless.
It describes a hopeless, sterile future.
No more children, no more light, no more expectations.
But what if there is a ray of light? What if there is a woman pregnant after more than 25 years without any births on Earth?
“Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.”
When I read Dystopian fiction, I want to read about hope and expectations that oppose the darkness. This is one of the darknest Dystopian books that I have ever read, but it can certainly change the way you think and it can definitely convince you to reevaluate your life and your aims.
I want to fight for a better future. I want my children and my children's children to fight for a better future. Everything is part of the survival game nevertheless.
January 15, 2020
This was another novel on the list of movie adaptations that I really enjoyed and wanted to see how the original source material compared.
Admittedly it’s been so long since I’ve seen the 2006 film but remember it enough to know that the premise are the same but each has a completely different feel.
The main crux is the human population can no longer reproduce, with the last child born 25 years previous and how it impacts on society.
With the story set during 2021 it couldn’t have been more timely, I definitely feel that there’s a disconnect with Baby Boomers and Millennials today - so a novel that explores themes of an ageing population without a new up and coming group just highlighted how the young and old complement and need each other.
From a maternal instinct of those doting on pets and the need for sex having been diminished to the elderly becoming more of a hindrance to a declining work force, James vividly creates a dysfunctional landscape perfectly.
The book is certainly a lot slower paced which actually aided the story that James is trying to tell.
The gradual decent into chaos as people lose focuses as inevitable but distant end is more clearly felt.
It’s one of them great occurrences where both the book and movie can be enjoyed separately.
Admittedly it’s been so long since I’ve seen the 2006 film but remember it enough to know that the premise are the same but each has a completely different feel.
The main crux is the human population can no longer reproduce, with the last child born 25 years previous and how it impacts on society.
With the story set during 2021 it couldn’t have been more timely, I definitely feel that there’s a disconnect with Baby Boomers and Millennials today - so a novel that explores themes of an ageing population without a new up and coming group just highlighted how the young and old complement and need each other.
From a maternal instinct of those doting on pets and the need for sex having been diminished to the elderly becoming more of a hindrance to a declining work force, James vividly creates a dysfunctional landscape perfectly.
The book is certainly a lot slower paced which actually aided the story that James is trying to tell.
The gradual decent into chaos as people lose focuses as inevitable but distant end is more clearly felt.
It’s one of them great occurrences where both the book and movie can be enjoyed separately.
December 25, 2007
I was disappointed by the film, finding myself unable to muster sympathy for the characters, but I was intrigued by the basic plot and so ventured out to explore the novel. PD James' original creation follows a plot significantly different compared to that of the movie, but I found it to be no less disappointing. The main character, Theo, was perhaps even less likable, due mostly to his lack of conviction about anything during the first half of the book. I was never able to develop an intense fear of or hatred for the government against which the main characters rebelled; the "Council of England" did seem to ignore a few issues of compromised civil-rights, but for the most part presented fairly logical arguments for their pragmatic approach to governance as the human race aged into its final days. Thus, when the inevitable revelation of human pregnancy was revealed and the protagonists embarked on a quest to evade the government until the baby was born, I was unable to share their feelings of fear and despair, and I cared little when characters died. The book moved quickly, especially the second half, which allowed me to follow its absurd plotline through to its disappointing completion - the story was mostly well-written, save for moments of impending excitement that would be introduced with the sentence, "And then it happened." I commend James for her imagination; the basic premise is indeed quite intriguing. I can't say her execution held my interest, though.
September 27, 2022
3.4/5
Multă lume face paralele între romanul ăsta și (superiorul) „Greybeard” al lui Brian Aldiss, din cauza subiectului pe care-l împart: un viitor apropiat în care omenirea își trăiește într-o liniște neplăcută ultimele zile, la decenii distanță de ultima naștere.
Eu aleg să văd „The Children of Men” ca pe un început, iar „Greybeard” ca pe sfârșitul poveștii. Punctele comune sunt foarte multe, inclusiv locațiile și tipologiile personajelor, iar ambele se sfârșesc cu un mic zvâcnet de speranță.
Scriitura romanului mi-a plăcut, are în ea poezia aceea specifică autorilor englezi, și chiar dacă am prevăzut câteva dintre punctele-cheie ale poveștii, am rămas impresionat de abilitatea autoarei de a aproxima și surprinde sentimentul acela de neputință care se naște în sufletul oamenilor care știu că după ce ei vor dispărea nimeni nu le mai lua locul.
Cască romanul ăsta un vid în sufletul tău și te face să te cutremuri și să îți dea seama exact cât de importanți sunt copiii, cât de importantă e succesiunea generațională, cât de esențială e pentru suflet cunoașterea faptului că, deși ducem vieți scurte și nesemnificative, e posibil ca nimic să nu fie în van, atâta timp cât oamenii înaintează prin secole.
Problema cea mai mare pe care o am, totuși, cu romanul este că are muuuuuult prea multe pagini pentru ce își propune să facă. Literalmente nimic nu se întâmplă în primele 200 de pagini. Jumătate din carte putea fi rașchetată și nu cred că am fi simțit diferență prea mare. Multe scene lente, în care ochiul naratorului se apleacă asupra multor obiecte și detalii de care puteam fi lejer scutiți. Nu e vorba că ar fi neplăcute, dar le-am considerat relativ inutile. Pe ultima sută de pagini cartea devine mai alertă, mizele încep să crească și finalul e unul puternic.
But still... „Greybeard” mi-a plăcut mai mult.
Multă lume face paralele între romanul ăsta și (superiorul) „Greybeard” al lui Brian Aldiss, din cauza subiectului pe care-l împart: un viitor apropiat în care omenirea își trăiește într-o liniște neplăcută ultimele zile, la decenii distanță de ultima naștere.
Eu aleg să văd „The Children of Men” ca pe un început, iar „Greybeard” ca pe sfârșitul poveștii. Punctele comune sunt foarte multe, inclusiv locațiile și tipologiile personajelor, iar ambele se sfârșesc cu un mic zvâcnet de speranță.
Scriitura romanului mi-a plăcut, are în ea poezia aceea specifică autorilor englezi, și chiar dacă am prevăzut câteva dintre punctele-cheie ale poveștii, am rămas impresionat de abilitatea autoarei de a aproxima și surprinde sentimentul acela de neputință care se naște în sufletul oamenilor care știu că după ce ei vor dispărea nimeni nu le mai lua locul.
Cască romanul ăsta un vid în sufletul tău și te face să te cutremuri și să îți dea seama exact cât de importanți sunt copiii, cât de importantă e succesiunea generațională, cât de esențială e pentru suflet cunoașterea faptului că, deși ducem vieți scurte și nesemnificative, e posibil ca nimic să nu fie în van, atâta timp cât oamenii înaintează prin secole.
Problema cea mai mare pe care o am, totuși, cu romanul este că are muuuuuult prea multe pagini pentru ce își propune să facă. Literalmente nimic nu se întâmplă în primele 200 de pagini. Jumătate din carte putea fi rașchetată și nu cred că am fi simțit diferență prea mare. Multe scene lente, în care ochiul naratorului se apleacă asupra multor obiecte și detalii de care puteam fi lejer scutiți. Nu e vorba că ar fi neplăcute, dar le-am considerat relativ inutile. Pe ultima sută de pagini cartea devine mai alertă, mizele încep să crească și finalul e unul puternic.
But still... „Greybeard” mi-a plăcut mai mult.
November 21, 2008
Not a bad book, but IMHO the movie is much better. P.D. James has a nice style, but it doesn't begin to compare with the film's stunning cinematography.
February 22, 2011
I saw the film adaptation of P. D. James' dystopian tale on television last night - with Caine and Owen reliably excellent - for the third or fourth time; and it reminded me, yet again, how much I'd enjoyed the novel upon which it was (loosely) based. James is one of those middle-aged female British writers - Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine is another - who put their seemingly endless supply of interesting, somewhat dark stories to the page with a considerable amount of subtlety and elegance stuffed into what otherwise appears to be simple and clean prose. If the general tone of a United Kingdom under the sort of eschatologically despotic government depicted initially strikes one as being a bit too placid and routine, perhaps, with the end date of the human race so signally visible and neither the atheistic nor religious segment of the populace able to claim aught but defeat from the definitive sign of a God's grace which either never existed in the first place, or has clearly been removed with extreme prejudice, James actually managed to find the pulse of the weary, apathetic torpor that would be engendered, replete with zero tolerance for any (overt) acts of criminality and a keenly felt desire to ensure that the imminent extinction of humanity was accompanied by a great deal of cheap, mindless fun.
James' Oxford don Theo exemplifies this voluntary abandonment from the affairs of the world with a nicely portrayed controlled despair, having had ample encouragement to join the autocratic Wardenship of his opportunistic cousin and finding himself no longer welcome when such an influential position would do his band of Fishies the most good. Wild tribes of young people having returned to the untamed lure of the forest; machinations surrounding control of the lone and miraculous pregnancy discovered amidst an island of infertility; the cousin-vs-cousin showdown with a crying baby - the noisome sound of the future awakening from a terrifying final sleep - providing the musical score; James handles it all with a professional and assured aplomb. An excellent way to while away an otherwise useless winter day.
James' Oxford don Theo exemplifies this voluntary abandonment from the affairs of the world with a nicely portrayed controlled despair, having had ample encouragement to join the autocratic Wardenship of his opportunistic cousin and finding himself no longer welcome when such an influential position would do his band of Fishies the most good. Wild tribes of young people having returned to the untamed lure of the forest; machinations surrounding control of the lone and miraculous pregnancy discovered amidst an island of infertility; the cousin-vs-cousin showdown with a crying baby - the noisome sound of the future awakening from a terrifying final sleep - providing the musical score; James handles it all with a professional and assured aplomb. An excellent way to while away an otherwise useless winter day.
September 25, 2020
Mi chiedo se, per alcuni grandi scrittori (penso, ad esempio, a Saramago, McCarthy, Atwood...) la spinta a scrivere una storia distopica sia la stessa che periodicamente mi fa sentire il bisogno di leggere questo tipo di storie.
Io comunque posso parlare solo per me e,nel mio caso, si tratta della necessità di rivivere una paura: anestetizzandola, tenendola a bada, circoscrivendola alle pagine di un romanzo.
Non sono una buona lettrice di gialli quindi non conosco l'opera di P.D. James specializzata in questo genere; sono stata, invece, attratta da questa che è considerata un'anomalia nella sua produzione, per l'appunto, una distopia.
La storia si svolge in un ipotetico futuro (un 2021 a noi molto prossimo) dove il mondo si "ammala" di sterilità, ponendo così la fine di ogni speranza futura.
Il tema dell'estinzione si congiunge anche a delle riflessioni sulla questione del potere.
E' una lettura piacevole anche per la scrittura elegante e la vena thriller che serpeggia dando una dosata tensione.
L'uomo si sminuisce se vive nell'ignoranza del proprio passato; senza la speranza nel futuro diventa una bestia.
Io comunque posso parlare solo per me e,nel mio caso, si tratta della necessità di rivivere una paura: anestetizzandola, tenendola a bada, circoscrivendola alle pagine di un romanzo.
Non sono una buona lettrice di gialli quindi non conosco l'opera di P.D. James specializzata in questo genere; sono stata, invece, attratta da questa che è considerata un'anomalia nella sua produzione, per l'appunto, una distopia.
La storia si svolge in un ipotetico futuro (un 2021 a noi molto prossimo) dove il mondo si "ammala" di sterilità, ponendo così la fine di ogni speranza futura.
Il tema dell'estinzione si congiunge anche a delle riflessioni sulla questione del potere.
E' una lettura piacevole anche per la scrittura elegante e la vena thriller che serpeggia dando una dosata tensione.
L'uomo si sminuisce se vive nell'ignoranza del proprio passato; senza la speranza nel futuro diventa una bestia.
January 9, 2026
i enjoyed this reread 🙂 i think i possibly enjoyed it more than the first time i read it... tho that was some years ago, and my memory is abit sketchy. i remember liking it then too tho 🙂
i was reminded of how well written it is 🙂
it was abit philosophical, and abit of a putting forward of ideas in places, but was tied together well as/into a novel 🙂
the main character is an academic, and consequently the book has a feel of that kinda echelon of society in ways, which could be alienating... but i didn't find it so overall, and that's maybe interesting to think about - why isn't it more alienating than it is, why does it work/engage despite this? 🤔
it's also broader than him/his sphere too, in both characters, circumstances and content 🙂
🌊🌍
💀 i thought the main character embodies well a sense of depression and cynicism that epitomises the state of the nation 🙂
💔 i found the observed (mass/group) Quietus scenes pretty devastating again (especially as someone considered of little worth in the society in which i live).
👥 i enjoyed the shifts, and shifting dynamics... the relationships, and the insights into each other, their situation...
✨ it perhaps got abit allegorical towards the end... 😉🤔🙃
🌊🌍
if you know the (2006) film, you don't know the book, and vice versa. but there is alot of overlap, and the film has a pretty faithful adherence to the overall plot of the novel, wrt the political powers of England, and the mood of the people, and especially wrt the main character/narrator of the story.
🌟 🌟 🌟🌟
accessed as an RNIB audiobook, donated by the publisher, well read by Daniel Weyman 🙂
i was reminded of how well written it is 🙂
it was abit philosophical, and abit of a putting forward of ideas in places, but was tied together well as/into a novel 🙂
the main character is an academic, and consequently the book has a feel of that kinda echelon of society in ways, which could be alienating... but i didn't find it so overall, and that's maybe interesting to think about - why isn't it more alienating than it is, why does it work/engage despite this? 🤔
it's also broader than him/his sphere too, in both characters, circumstances and content 🙂
🌊🌍
💀 i thought the main character embodies well a sense of depression and cynicism that epitomises the state of the nation 🙂
💔 i found the observed (mass/group) Quietus scenes pretty devastating again (especially as someone considered of little worth in the society in which i live).
👥 i enjoyed the shifts, and shifting dynamics... the relationships, and the insights into each other, their situation...
✨ it perhaps got abit allegorical towards the end... 😉🤔🙃
🌊🌍
if you know the (2006) film, you don't know the book, and vice versa. but there is alot of overlap, and the film has a pretty faithful adherence to the overall plot of the novel, wrt the political powers of England, and the mood of the people, and especially wrt the main character/narrator of the story.
🌟 🌟 🌟🌟
accessed as an RNIB audiobook, donated by the publisher, well read by Daniel Weyman 🙂
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 3, 2019
Good read. Easy, compelling writing. The characters of Xan and Theo are very complicated.
Hope to find time (not now) to see the movie, and read Aldiss' book, Greybeard, which Aldiss appears to believe James ripped off, for her story.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting connection to Greybeardby Brian W. Aldiss, noted in a goodreads user's review for this book:
I purchased Greybeard on Kindle in Jan of 2018. I'm reading Children of Men in Jan/Feb of 2019. Hopefully I can find time to get back and read this book (Greybeard) sometime later in Feb or March of this year {2019). Maybe check out the movie Children of Men, too !
Hope to find time (not now) to see the movie, and read Aldiss' book, Greybeard, which Aldiss appears to believe James ripped off, for her story.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting connection to Greybeardby Brian W. Aldiss, noted in a goodreads user's review for this book:
Greybeard
by Brian W. Aldiss
416390
Paul Bryant's review Jul 10, 2016
* * * it was ok
bookshelves: sf-novels-aaargh
A quote from The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss' autobiography:
P D James, ordinarily a bestselling middle-class thriller writer, set The Children of Men in the future. The novel was published in 1992. I began to worry about her novel when readers wrote to me, pointing out many similarities between James' novel and my own Greybeard. Greybeard was published by the same publisher, edited by the same editor as James', 30 years earlier; it was still in print... The points of similarity between the novels are astonishing. Both centre around Oxford and are set in a world dominated by a tinpot dictator, where there are no more children...
******* more at link - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I purchased Greybeard on Kindle in Jan of 2018. I'm reading Children of Men in Jan/Feb of 2019. Hopefully I can find time to get back and read this book (Greybeard) sometime later in Feb or March of this year {2019). Maybe check out the movie Children of Men, too !
April 23, 2017
Dystopian books have a certain appeal. Dystopian films also appeal so when I watched Children of Men several years back I was impressed enough to think that I would one day read the book. I finally have.
Now this is not meant to be a "film is better than the book" review and vice versa. I, for example, love the Terrence Malick version of the very good book by James Jones The Thin Red Line. What I liked about that film was that Malick took an idea and made it into something other. The same can be said for The Children of Men as well. Alfonso Cuaron took an idea and headed into very topical issues such as refugees. It worked.
The book alas has left me cold. It is slow, it plods and it just seems out of date. Of its time maybe? Even that question worries me. Now I am happy to be corrected here but being written in 1992 surely the author would be aware of a few of the more “modern” communication methods such the internet and mobile phones for example. Even such technology such as infra-red / heat seeking devices were around then. Nope we get none of that. We get a Britain written about as if it is the 1950’s as opposed to the 2020’s that is the era we are supposed to be reading about. On the other hand we get mention of drugs that can cure Alzheimer's. In the book people have drugs to control a horrendous disease but there is no communication such as the WWW?
I suppose that maybe the author wanted it to seem slow, after all this was a world that was made up old people. If so it did not work for me. If this had been written in the 50’s by say John Wyndham I would be more forgiving but it was written in the information age. The author missed this sadly. Very disappointing.
Now this is not meant to be a "film is better than the book" review and vice versa. I, for example, love the Terrence Malick version of the very good book by James Jones The Thin Red Line. What I liked about that film was that Malick took an idea and made it into something other. The same can be said for The Children of Men as well. Alfonso Cuaron took an idea and headed into very topical issues such as refugees. It worked.
The book alas has left me cold. It is slow, it plods and it just seems out of date. Of its time maybe? Even that question worries me. Now I am happy to be corrected here but being written in 1992 surely the author would be aware of a few of the more “modern” communication methods such the internet and mobile phones for example. Even such technology such as infra-red / heat seeking devices were around then. Nope we get none of that. We get a Britain written about as if it is the 1950’s as opposed to the 2020’s that is the era we are supposed to be reading about. On the other hand we get mention of drugs that can cure Alzheimer's. In the book people have drugs to control a horrendous disease but there is no communication such as the WWW?
I suppose that maybe the author wanted it to seem slow, after all this was a world that was made up old people. If so it did not work for me. If this had been written in the 50’s by say John Wyndham I would be more forgiving but it was written in the information age. The author missed this sadly. Very disappointing.
February 11, 2018
3,5 καλο αλλα ποτε δεν τρελενομουν γι'αυτην Τζεημς ...
June 14, 2021
Muy buena idea pero ejecutada de forma bastante mediocre. La premisa de un mundo que se extingue lentamente, sin futuro, sin esperanzas, es una poderosa idea para desarrollar una historia.
La primera parte del libro es la mejor, el planteamiento del mundo , esa aparente "normalidad" en que sigue viviendo la gente mientras todo se va descomponiendo más rápido de lo que parece narrado por un protagonista que me resulta muy atrayente. Alguien que se pasó toda su vida anclado en la frialdad, el desinterés y el cinismo y que según el mundo se acerca a su fin el peso de la culpa y la decepción lo llevan a implicarse.
La segunda parte es un despropósito, con personajes poco creíbles y acciones y reacciones de los protagonistas que no tienen ningún sentido. Por no hablar de un final precipitado y del todo increíble.
Po cierto, mucho mejor la película, aunque realmente no comparte con el libro más que el planteamiento inicial.
La primera parte del libro es la mejor, el planteamiento del mundo , esa aparente "normalidad" en que sigue viviendo la gente mientras todo se va descomponiendo más rápido de lo que parece narrado por un protagonista que me resulta muy atrayente. Alguien que se pasó toda su vida anclado en la frialdad, el desinterés y el cinismo y que según el mundo se acerca a su fin el peso de la culpa y la decepción lo llevan a implicarse.
La segunda parte es un despropósito, con personajes poco creíbles y acciones y reacciones de los protagonistas que no tienen ningún sentido. Por no hablar de un final precipitado y del todo increíble.
Po cierto, mucho mejor la película, aunque realmente no comparte con el libro más que el planteamiento inicial.
March 12, 2008
Loved the movie and can't wait to read the book.
Well, the book and the movie are definitely two separate entities. They even have different endings. P.D. James' book lacks the action and excitement of the film version and P.D. James does go on about things like the decor of Theo's house and the political makeup of her futuristic England. And I would have liked the main character Theo to behave a bit more honorably. But I enjoyed the rendering of a world in which the last baby was born 25 years ago.
The book did hit home for me as the last of the Omega generation was born about the same time as my 12 year old daughter. I found myself imagining what it would be like bringing up the last of the race, and the heartbreak of knowing that with every milestone my daughter reached, that would be the last time ever. After her, there would be no more.
The most interesting part of the book was the description of how the human population dealt with global infertility. Women who would never have children start pushing dolls around in prams as if they were babies or having their cats christened.
When I finished, it was a relief to look around and see my neighbor's children playing outside.
Well, the book and the movie are definitely two separate entities. They even have different endings. P.D. James' book lacks the action and excitement of the film version and P.D. James does go on about things like the decor of Theo's house and the political makeup of her futuristic England. And I would have liked the main character Theo to behave a bit more honorably. But I enjoyed the rendering of a world in which the last baby was born 25 years ago.
The book did hit home for me as the last of the Omega generation was born about the same time as my 12 year old daughter. I found myself imagining what it would be like bringing up the last of the race, and the heartbreak of knowing that with every milestone my daughter reached, that would be the last time ever. After her, there would be no more.
The most interesting part of the book was the description of how the human population dealt with global infertility. Women who would never have children start pushing dolls around in prams as if they were babies or having their cats christened.
When I finished, it was a relief to look around and see my neighbor's children playing outside.
filmed
December 31, 2012This is perhaps the only film from the past decade which I can watch eight plus times within a year. Compulsively rewatchable. Perhaps one of the greatest movies ever made. Something. But you mustmustmustmust watch this. It is unbelievably fantastic. Reallyreallyreally great. My enthusiasm is earnest and I won't use the required umpteen !'s required to indicate the urgency with which you must watch this beautiful, hopeful film. [and don't miss Zizek's five minute commentary]
The film is so good that I don't give a shit about the book which may well have its merits but can't be as good of a book qua book as the film is qua film. Please go watch this now. Now!
The film is so good that I don't give a shit about the book which may well have its merits but can't be as good of a book qua book as the film is qua film. Please go watch this now. Now!
October 14, 2017
A totalitarian world (2020s) where all humans are infertile and there are incentives for the infirm to commit suicide. Dissidents on the run, chases and hardship etc, but not as clichéd as that sounds. Gripping, chilling and (mostly) believable characters. The "science" is never really explained, so futuristic rather than sci fi? The film is very different, and not in a good way; fortunately I read the book first.
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