All the Manner of Life

The Children Act
by Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, 2014, 213 pages, $30

This novel is, I think, a small masterpiece, and in what follows I want to illumine how its quality arises out of a meticulous naturalism in the writing, one that gathers into the story its extraordinary mythic charge and the exquisite realisation of its central character, Fiona Maye, yet leaves us with a sense of an everyday fabric having been delineated just so, justly and so.

Fiona is a respected High Court judge living with her husband, Jack, at Gray’s Inn Square in London. As the novel opens, we learn their long marriage is in crisis, Jack announcing he wants Fiona’s licence to proceed with an affair because their own sexual relation has lapsed for several weeks. Fiona, hurt, angry, has been proofing the judgment of a recent case in which she has presided. Her cases often involve children, for her expertise is in divorce settlement. The couple is childless.

And here, finely integrated, is the substance with which McEwan creates Fiona’s consciousness, and the calibre of her intelligence. There are the furnishings of a bourgeois apartment, the good whisky and its matrix of respectable/indulgent attitudes, the incessant (unnatural?) summer downpours. There are the difficulties of her recent cases—one a custody battle in a strict Jewish family, another a mixed marriage where the father has absconded to Morocco with the child. And deftly included there is a consciousness of our wider planet, weather systems off the Azores causing the rain, news from war-torn Syria. These details fret upon Fiona’s attention, capturing the flickery nature of modern stimulae while revealing her clear, moral, authoritative being, now at a moment of personal crisis. This is very deft depiction. So too is the pursuit of her reactions to her spouse’s iconoclastic challenge to their union. These modulate from initial shock to a colder retaliatory mood at the same time as she composes herself for the family court where she presides.

And then we learn (as her husband does not) that her reason for losing interest in sex arises from a case where she has been compelled to judge in favour of killing one Siamese twin in order that the other might live. This, for all her judicial dispassion, has made her recoil against bodily intimacy. For here, we are quietly aware, is a childless woman put in the way of legally murdering a part-child, and McEwan is searching in how he exposes the visceral and moral necessity in Fiona’s reaction. It is fair to add that we encounter Fiona’s restive consciousness in a very exactly mapped London, and all this preparation is encountered in the first chapter.

In the law case that lies at the heart of the story, Fiona must judge in a case where a hospital wishes to give a life-saving blood transfusion to a boy, Adam, just short of his eighteenth birthday, from a Jehovah’s Witnesses family for whom to perform such an operation is to contaminate essential beliefs, and both parents and patient have refused it. The hospital’s case for intervening to save life is crisply, forensically delivered, inarguably one might say. Then the family and their legals reply, and McEwan does something both clever and unerringly fair. He persuades us, not that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ belief in withholding intervention is reasonable per se, but that it is fair for the reader to believe the Jehovah’s Witnesses parents and boy believe it and that this right-of-belief has a sovereignty that the law cannot automatically dismiss. I find this particularly impressive in The Children Act, affirming as it does how the essential value of the Novel, as one of the human arts, is the fairness with which it treats all the manner of Life that comes before it, giving necessity to the welcome and the unwelcome alike. Here, in the very impulses of composition, is what Leavis would have called “moral seriousness” and I imagine that brave chisel-faced old gent waving McEwan’s novel past his strictures.

For Fiona, the effective argument from both sides of the emergency determines her to travel to the boy’s bedside and assess his attitude for herself. This is conscientious of her, but also consequential, for this act creates a personal relationship between her and the boy.

Adam has all the necessity of a precocious youth facing death. The very candor she must use in quizzing him establishes their rapport. He reads her one of his poems. On his violin he plays her a favourite, Yeats’s poem about faery, “Down by the Salley Gardens”, and she sings along. She returns to the court, and in the face of the Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibition, orders that the blood transfusion be given, and the chance of life thereby made probable.

A month or so later she is doing judicial duty in Newcastle when Adam locates her in her hotel. He is now eighteen, immensely grateful to be alive, has run away from home and believes he should now live with Fiona. Naturally her professional and personal circumstances make this impossible, but in dismissing him …

lightly she took the lapel of his thin jacket between her fingers and drew him towards her. Her intention was to kiss him on the cheek, but as she reached up and he stooped a little their faces came close. He turned his head and their lips met. She could have drawn back, she could have stepped right away from him. Instead she lingered, defenceless before the moment. The sensation of skin on skin obliterated any possibility of choice. If it was possible to kiss chastely full on the lips, this was what she did. A fleeting contact, but more than the idea of a kiss, more than a mother might give her grown-up son. Over in two seconds, perhaps three. Time enough to feel in the softness of his lips all the years, all the life, that separated her from him … She let go of his lapel and said again, “You must go.”

And here the scrupulous naturalism of the story gathers its resonant psychological and mythical underpinnings into itself. McEwan’s control is, as I say, meticulous. This woman judge delivered the precocious boy into his life. And now he returns to her, impelled to seek a mother. If that were not charged enough, in the glancing moment of affection that passes between them, an impulsive maternal gesture becomes charged with Eros. At one level the encounter is outlandish, at another it has complete pathological necessity.

From this, their brief re-encounter, Adam departs to his piteous fate, Fiona to a gradual restoration of her marriage and the burden of that decent, intelligent, stricken conscience we know her to possess and which now lodges the perplexity of this case and its aftermath. Here is story indeed.

The placing of outlandish incident into a finely naturalised context has been a feature of McEwan’s fiction over a long period. In his novel The Child in Time (1987) a young father who grieves for the loss of his child in a supermarket, finds himself outside a café in a wood, and behind the glass sees his own parents as they were when young. They are in intent discussion. Later, the young man learns from his father that his mother had been pregnant with him at the time, and the intentness of their exchange turned on whether they should terminate the pregnancy or have the child; he watches his own chance of life in the balance. In the later novel Saturday (2005) we learn how the hero, a surgeon, first meets his very beautiful wife to whom he is devoted when he had to surgically cut open her face; the lover begins his lifelong protection by taking a knife to the features he adores. These, and other instances in McEwan’s fiction, are never presented as sensational. Rather, they make a home for the outlandish in the very fabric of the natural, such that the strange sustains its charge with no violation to the tenor of Life’s naturalism.

Indeed, this novelist tucks away his threads of fabulism very neatly. For instance, near the beginning of The Children Act, one of Fiona’s fellow judges makes a wisecrack about dead bodies and lawyers and the surface collegiality of the judicial chambers is deftly sketched by this. Towards the end of the story, as Fiona mounts the stage to perform at the piano, this same judge is at the step, imparting to her some news she does not at first catch. It relates to Adam’s death. And suddenly we become aware that this casual character, at an emblematic level, is also the novel’s death-messenger.

So the fineness of The Children Act, and the fineness in McEwan’s fiction generally, lies in the compass, the comprehending of its naturalism. He communicates a sufficiency of understanding. This is a pacy novel; argument in court moves with a clip, a seeming legal digression returns quickly to its psychological impact. We are close to Fiona throughout these 213 pages, know the textures and noises of her present and have pools of light from her past. At the same time we’re aware of those Atlantic weather systems and Middle East politics, the planetary context, or the hubbub of a chambers Christmas party, the winking of hospital monitoring equipment, the social context, the glimpses back on childhoods. Dimensions of being are being arranged; does this cover the novelist’s job? And beneath these everyday things, we touch the death-figures of shadow-play and the ur-relationships of myth, “that roar on the other side of silence”, as George Eliot phrased it. This world McEwan depicts is shimmery with its modernity, yet threaded with moral and psychic pressures that are primitive and perennial. It is the novelist’s knowingness, his control of these resources, the confidence with which he integrates them in Fiona’s consciousness, that makes The Children Act a small masterpiece in my view. The story is moving. The art leaves one grateful.

Alan Gould’s ninth novel, a picaresque titled The Poets’ Stairwell, has just been published by Black Pepper Press in Melbourne. One of his poems is in this issue; more will appear shortly