The Children Act - Ian McEwan

I’m going to admit something from the start here.  I don’t like Ian McEwan’s books.  I have nothing against him personally, in fact I have some admiration in how he manages to put pen to paper when his head is so stuck up his backside.  I find his writing style overly pretentious for the kinds of books that he writes.  Prose will be peppered with laboured metaphors and unnecessary digressions, and his characters have an unfailing ability to irritate me in a way I’m not always able to put my finger on.

Therefore when my book club chose to read his latest book, The Children Act, I immediately resolved to find literally anything else to do on that day – but I changed my mind.  Perhaps I was a giant ball of prejudice here, unfairly tarring a book by its predecessors; maybe in this book I’d finally see what his legions of fans have been raving about for decades.  It was also helpful that the book is short.

The Children Act is about Fiona Maye, a high court justice who works in family law whose marriage is breaking down.  So far, so Hollywood.  Her husband of 35 years, frustrated at their near-extinct sex life, wants to have an open marriage.  This request she denies, causing him to run off with a statistician and ultimately have rather disappointing sex.  While this all plays out, a case comes before her regarding a Jehovah’s Witness family who are refusing a blood transfusion for their critically ill son on religious grounds.

That would seem to provide for an interesting story, but the narrative is desperately overworked.  McEwan time and again falls into the trap of showing off all the knowledge he has gleamed of the legal profession, instead of weaving the necessary details into the story.  When Fiona walks to work, McEwan feels the need to describe every turn, every landmark she passes.  In such a short novel these unnecessary digressions and embellishments are deeply distracting.

Indeed part of the problem in many ways is the book’s brevity.  The legal case itself is over fairly quickly, but the personal story of her marriage needed more time to develop. As it is, this part of the plot seems tagged on, when really that should have been the real meat of the dish.

That is not to say that there isn’t good stuff going on in The Children Act.  The scenes with Fiona and the Jehovah’s Witness boy Adam are really quite beautiful, as is a scene at the end where she is giving a piano recital – it’s just that the whole thing is swamped by a very heavy-handed, ham-fisted style of prose, and a plot that isn’t given the space to develop.  There was an interesting story in there, but McEwan completely missed it.  In other words, it’s a classic Ian McEwan novel.

6/10

Favourite Quotes


“Worth remembering the world was never how she anxiously dreamed it.”

“Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another. What was”

“In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed, love was recast as delusion.”

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

One can judge a book on a number of different levels (plot and characterization to name just two), but writing I find is often the most contentious of all of them.  Some believe that for a book to be considered well written it must be full of complex literary devices, or it should utilise language that is alien to all but the most verbose and lexically gifted readers.  Others think that a book is well-written if it meets its audience at a level that it is pitched while still challenging them, and I have far more sympathy with that view. But sometimes writing can have a true beauty – a transportative aesthetic that transmits more than just images, but smells, tastes, sounds and tactile senses that totally envelop you.  An impenetrable book cannot achieve this, but neither can something populist – it needs to be something special.  Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North is very very special indeed.

The book is set in the Burma death railway during the Second World War, where an unflinching Australian army doctor battles with his Japanese captors to try and allievate the suffering of his rapidly decaying soldiers. It has its core in this horror but it flits between this and flashes backwards and forwards, focussing on the man he was before and after his traumatic ordeal, showing the effect that it had. 

Before the conflict he was a man from the sticks in rural Tasmania who became a doctor and marries a society girl, but fell in lustful love with his uncle’s young wife.  After the war, he is an adulterous and neglectful husband and a cold and distant father, haunted by his war and his love.  The book is marketed as a love story, but I found this the least compelling part of the book.  The descriptions of his marriage are powerful, but they don’t stand out from the rest of the literary field.

Where this book excels and envelops is in Burma on the railway.  It is a pitiless tale of human suffering, with a quality of writing that truly beggars belief.  Flanagan has an ability in a sentence to paint a the most vivid of portraits, but one that engages all the senses.  The mud, the stench, the rot and the screams are all there.  It is totally horrifying and engrossing, and makes you truly wonder the depths of human cruelty and wonder just what could drive someone to do such a thing.

And then he answers, by writing sections from the perspective of his Japanese captors.  This is another of this book’s triumphs, because it shows the prison in which these men were held by their country and their emperor.  Their martial conditioning causes their sociopathic personalities and in the passages of their post-war lives, we compare their lot with that of the few surviving Australians and find that at a basic human level, they were not all that different.

Perhaps great writing is a bit like love. Ineffable, but you know it when you see it.  Buy this book and you’ll see it all right.

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