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.”