Ian McEwan Gets a Head Start on the 2015 Awards Season

The Children Act - Ian McEwan

There’s a hoary joke about a married couple who divorced when both are 54 after the husband had an affair with an 18-year-old. Once the wife had found a boy-toy of her own, she gleefully informed her ex-husband that she got the better end of the deal, mathematically speaking: after all, 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Ba-dump-bump.

McEwan ca. 2008 (source: wikipedia)

Such might well be the story of Fiona and Jack, childless and almost 60, when he decides he “needs his space” to take up with a coworker born well after his and Fiona’s wedding day. Their thirty-some-year marriage sundered in one acrimonious moment, Jack departs for his would-be lover’s flat and Fiona returns to her work. The scenario may be regrettably commonplace, but the actors are not: Lady Justice Fiona Maye is a judge in family court. Each day the slim, elegant juror presides over the dissolution of marital unions, the tawdry tales before her bench really not unlike her own.



Of course she has other cases, one of which is Adam’s. Only seventeen, the Jehovah’s Witness has mere days of life remaining without a treatment that includes a transfusion, treatment both patient and family refuse on religious grounds. Lady Justice Maye must decide for them, and that requires that she meet with Adam. That meeting would change two lives.

Only a few days gone, the wandering Jack returns, chastened, to a home now characterized by cool civility. Fiona goes about her business, Adam’s case disappearing into the background of thousands of claimants and cases that come before her, the arguments and the decisions. Then one day an envelope arrives, an envelope that sets in motion a slow cascade of events that might end in joy, might end in sorrow. Which it will be depends on the mercurial whims of a teenager and the propriety of a woman three times his age. Ian McEwan, thrice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and once a winner (for Amsterdam), introduces his readers to the rarefied world of high jurisprudence in The Children Act. His protagonist, a woman of great intelligence and dedication to the law, demonstrates that those who sit in judgment are every bit as human as those who stand before them. Though Fiona Maye's private life may be more refined than that of a brickmason or a rock star, it is ultimately as messy and anyone else’s.

It’s easy to see why McEwan continues to collect prizes like the 1950s Yankees – besides the Booker, he has a Whitbread, a Maugham, a W. H. Smith and the National Books Critics Circle Award. His prose is simultaneously spare and gloriously evocative, his characters marvelously complex. He has no need to shock his reader by words or deeds; instead his greatest literary weapon is a prodigious vocabulary, wielded with surgical skill.

Fiona Maye’s quiet desperation, her measured calm atop restless emotions, are the stuff of which great literature is made. The Children Act may well be the best book you read this year.