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“Marital or partner breakdown swelled like a freak spring tide, sweeping away entire households, scattering possessions and hopeful dreams, drowning those without a powerful instinct for survival. Loving promises were denied or rewritten, once easy companions became artful combatants crouching behind counsel…. Once neglected domestic items were bitterly fought for…. In the minds of the principals, the history of the marriage was redrafted to have been always doomed. Love was recast as delusion…. And the children?.... bargaining chips….”
from The Children Act, by Ian McEwan
The above quoted descriptions of marital infarction and demise are from McEwan’s 2014 novel The Children Act, which has been made into a motion picture of the same title.
Many films depict extramarital dalliance. McEwan’s novel speaks to “the contamination of marriage in the cause of novelty.”
“Bitter feelings are discharged and renewed as ardently as wedding vows.”
In divorce, money and property became “the new coinage of half-truth and special pleading” with “greedy husbands versus greedy wives maneuvering like nations at the end of a war, grabbing from the ruins what spoils they could before the final withdrawal….”
Happily, the novel does not sink with such unhappiness, but uses the wife’s domestic conflict as an emotional and psychological challenge to her sworn duty to rightly and justly decide the fate others’ marriages. The wife is a most reputable and extremely conscientious family court judge.
The Court of Family Proceedings
Ian McEwan’s novel tells us that Family Court rooms, halls, and chambers “teem with strange differences, special pleadings, intimate half-truths, exotic accusations” with parents finding themselves engaged in “vicious combat with the one they once loved.”
Allies become enemies: “What began with love, ends in loathing.” Yes, for sure, lots of divorce cases. And thus, very often, custody battles.
An example: The husband from a rigid almost-tribal heritage insists on an upbringing of daughters in accordance with his culture’s traditions and observances – its rigidities and limits. The wife, who has become much more secular, seeks liberation for her daughters, free of constraints, “the cult’s” religious-and-cultural hobblings.
High Court judge Fiona Maye has to decide whose vision of a child’s future should prevail. In a range of custody and care disputes, she “believed she brought reasonableness to hopeless situations.”
In 1989, the British Parliament put into law The Children Act, which, in pertinent part, states, “When a court determines any question with respect to… the upbringing of a child… the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.”
Charged with that paramount consideration, childless Fiona Maye makes wise decisions as to upbringings. We do wonder, further on, about her own, personal, decision-making.
Putting aside what may be thought of as a lapse in propriety and judicial restraint, the reader is rewarded with discussions of cases that have her struggle emotionally, intelligently, and morally.
A dire contest – life and death
She must adjudicate the case of Siamese twins “who lay top-and-tailed amid a tangle of life-support systems on a pediatric intensive-care bed, joined at the pelvis and sharing a single torso, their splayed legs at right angles to their spines, in resemblance of a many-pointed starfish…. four arms raised in surrender to the court’s decision.” The heart and aorta of one part of this fusion feeds and sustains the other. The latter “didn’t have the lungs to cry with.”
A London hospital urgently seeks permission to sever the shared components to preserve the sustaining and sustainable life-in-being, and then to proceed with complicated reconstructive surgeries. The parents refuse to sanction what they believe would be murder.
Ian McEwan explained that “In this dire contest, there was only one desirable or less undesirable outcome, but a lawful route to it was not easy…. The legal and moral space was tight and the matter had to be set as a choice of the lesser evil.”
The reader is given to understand the dilemma, the possible medical procedures and probabilities, along with the plausible legal justifications.
The decisions that Ian McEwan writes for Fiona Maye are extremely well-reasoned, wise, compassionate, humane, and even noble – even elegant. In his Acknowledgments, McEwan credits two esteemed High Court judges and two highly-regarded barristers who provided him with the background and counsel that informed his novelistic renditions of actual legal controversies.
The cases are provocative, and interesting; the relating quite intelligible.
The Biological, the Chemical, and the Metaphysical
McEwan has us think about the role of chance, the sorting out of many bio-chemical actions and reactions, which may proceed to health, or not. He has us realize quirks of bio-chemical fate and mystery: “a failure somewhere along the chain of chemical events, a tiny disturbance in a cascade of protein reactions. A molecular event ballooned like an exploding universe, out onto the wider scale of human misery.”
He has us ponder, by asking if there is some cruel or avenging fate. A mysterious, unfathomable, purpose? Or, “merely, a gene transcribed in error, an enzyme recipe skewed, a chemical bond severed…. Blind luck to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place.”
A Wife’s Humiliation: A 35-year marriage torn asunder
The irony: The 59-year-old Fiona Maye, who presides over and adjudicates marital disputes and custody battles, is served with a breach-of-faith in her home chambers: Her 60-year-old husband wants to have an affair – “one big passionate affair” delivering “ecstasy, almost blacking out with the thrill of it.”
Fiona Maye had thought they had settled into a comfortable (albeit imperfect) life together – a childless marriage of mutual respect and kindness. With her husband’s straightforward announcement, she can think only of “disruption and disentangling” punctuated with “ill-timed phone calls.” Was he really quite prepared to pay for his pleasure with her misery?
As a High Court family judge, “she had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent, and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate?”
“In the spirit of openness,” he had been calmly candid about his “unmet sexual needs that caused him great unhappiness.” He hoped to gain her assent.
In weighing his admission and complaint, she wished she had taken notes, “to measure the insult carefully.”
Priorities – focus, neglect: The Law is a Jealous Mistress
“Self-pity in others embarrassed her,” so she judiciously worked out that her personal life had become superseded and supplanted by her professional advancements. She admits to herself that “she belonged to the law as some women had once been brides of Christ.”
Self-blame: She admits to herself that she has been “selfish, crabbed, drily ambitious in pursuing her own ends, pretending to herself that her career was not in essence self-gratification.” But then, she entertains a counter argument: Surely her husband of thirty-five years was now being selfish in seeking his self-gratification.
The odds against fulfilling self-gratification
She tries to console herself with thoughts of her would-be wayward husband’s absurdity: she foresees his further physical diminishment – “hair thinning monkishly, allowed to grow long in unconvincing compensation; shanks less muscular, not quite filling out his jeans; the eyes holding a gentle hint of future vacancy….”
“In coquettish reply,” Fiona Maye acknowledges “the thickening of her ankles, her backside swelling like summer cumulus, her waist waxing stout as her gums receded.”
While McEwan has her sense all this physical expansion and decline “in paranoid millimeters,” he does tell us of the unjust misfortune for women: “the special insult the years reserve for certain women, as the corners of the mouth turn downward in pursuit of a look of constant reproach.”
A full-length mirror confirms the self-reproach: “her body looked foolish… miraculously shrunken in some parts, bloated in others. Bottom-heavy. A ridiculous package. Fragile.”
Her “affairs”
Her eminently sensible and humane ruling in the case of the Siamese twins “left scar tissue in her memory.” Her husband’s proceedings are a festering wound. His “excruciating frankness” has her find “relief in the treeless heath of other people’s problems.”
Then comes an urgent petition from a London hospital seeking to transfuse a 17-year-old cancer patient whose Jehovah’s Witness parents refuse what is likely a life-saving procedure.
Medical testimony supports the hospital’s position. The parents’ religious convictions oppose introducing alien blood: “it is contrary to their faith to accept blood products into their bodies.” Leukemia-specific drugs had been administered but were clearly not sufficient to bring about remission, let alone recovery – and these administrations caused anemia, which has to be countered. Medical experts all agreed that life-saving treatment required blood transfusion. Without the transfusion, the boy faced painful deteriorations and dysfunctions, resulting in “an agonizing, unnecessary and horrific death.”
In his battle with, or submission to, a rare form of leukemia, the teenager (an only child just months shy of the age of consent) is “confronting death for his own or his parents’ beliefs.” The reader is advised that “It was not Fiona Maye’s business or mission to save him, but to decide what was reasonable and lawful.” She knows what her judicial position requires of her. From a jurisprudential standpoint, she can be rightly curious. Are the parents’ beliefs “an affirmation of the son’s, or a death sentence he dares not challenge?”
Can Fiona Maye separate the boy from the religious tenets of his parents and church elders? Within his church, the boy will be celebrated for his adherence to dictates. Is the boy capable of defecting from the sect’s expectations of a faithful-to-the-end adherent? Within the hospital, the parents and the church are viewed as sacrificing a life for religious dogma.
Her uncertainties, at a time of her own personal distress, complicate and cloud her judgment and discretion. “Abandoned, in the infancy of old-age,” she fails to fully comprehend the 17-year-old patient’s immature needs and fantasies. He is unworldly, naïvely romantic, foolish – but she can’t bring herself to discourage his letters. This failure allows the patient to imagine a relationship of some sort, with her. While she doesn’t encourage it, she allows for it by patiently enduring his awful violin playing; and by over-complimenting his poetry – which is quite juvenile, especially in the lines that seem to welcome martyrdom. For many readers, his poetical outpouring and imaginings will be hard to stomach. McEwan must have intended this.
Marital Disengagement – Loss of Inward Dignity
For me, the “involvement” with the young patient is off-putting, even as the novel rewards with its descriptions of marital disappointment and disengagement.
Fiona Maye “wonders whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, whether it was not contempt and ostracism she feared… but pity.” For her, “to be the object of general pity was also a form of social death.”
“She could not bear to hear herself explain her situation and make it irreversibly real.” She would “curl up in troubled sleep” – sleep troubled by scenes of “social inconvenience” and thoughts of anticipated embarrassment. Troubled sleep was accompanied by “numbness.” Neither could fend off the social “amputation” she was suffering – and which made her vulnerable.
Abandonment, Social Death – the Novel’s notes
The boy patient is infatuated with the prospect of martyrdom and becomes infatuated with the attentions of the judge (“My Lady”) who he takes as his savior.
For her part, Fiona Maye immerses herself ever-more-fully in her cases, to tamp down her feelings of sadness and anger. She experiences “a dark hallowing-out, an emptiness… threatening to annihilate her past.”
For many readers, the novel’s descriptions of marital separation and its uncertainties will be worth the read.
Fiona Maye experiences “a blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted her husband back, she never wanted to see him again…. She had been humiliated and didn’t want anyone to know and would pretend that all was fine. She felt tainted by secrecy…. She still recoiled from hearing the worst.” McEwan tells us that she engages in “treadmill thinking, from which only sleep, medically induced, could rescue her.” That tortured sleep, and “an unorthodox excursion” to the side of a 17-year-old’s intensive-care hospital bed.
Can telling descriptions of abandonment and “social death” and emotional “hallowing out” and “annihilated” personal past be conveyed in a movie?
An unfortunate focus
The 17-year-old patient is, in keeping with the novel’s flap-copy, “a beautiful boy.” Would Fiona Maye’s vulnerability have been as much in play had the patient not been “a beautiful boy”?
The novel is honest with the reader: By threatening his own life, the boy “set in motion a fascinating drama in which he starred in every scene, and which brought to his bedside a parade of important and importuning adults.” He was seeking adoration for his sacrifice – a celebrated life, upon and after death.
Fiona Maye is “touched” by the boy’s “fresh and excitable innocence” – his “delicacy.” She doesn’t disabuse him of his folly. Will she be able to bring herself to save him from it? Will she find legal justification and judicial precedent to rule that “his life is more precious than his dignity”? And is his sense of dignity rational, sensible, and worthy of judicial deference?
The above excerpts are evidence, reason enough to read Ian McEwan, whose 2001 novel Atonement has rightly been celebrated, along with his other works. Atonement captivates by virtue of the mishaps that make us want to reach out to prevent the tragedy that reverberates; because of the characters who infuriate; for the novel’s descriptions of the perils endured in the trudge and scamper to Dunkirk; and for the novel’s masterful surprises.
The Children Act makes a good case for life being more precious than dignity. Ian McEwan’s Atonement provides tragic examples of dignity being more precious than life. The latter tells a much sadder, far more tragic, story, but there is more life to it.
The virtues of The Children Act are McEwan’s takes on “the marital fault lines” with the terrain’s “dismal constraints of honesty” – the cohabitation with “a radioactive presence” with sidestepping on the home turf in “a silent and solemn pas de deux.”
Can there be a reconciliation, even though things could never be quite the same?
Eventually, her husband ventures a rapprochement. Across a relatively private table at a very civilized dinner, he speaks to her with “an awkward delicacy, as though she were some kind of unusual bomb that might go off in mid-sentence.”
McEwan allows us to eavesdrop: “Toward the end of the meal, when they had exhausted the safer topics, there came a threatening silence…. Unspoken mutual recriminations troubled them.”
For her, there was his “brazen excursion.” For him, her “overblown sense of injury” which failed to account for her preoccupations that had her neglect marital fun.
Could there be a genuine “thaw” or will they continue to “self-consciously avoid each other” and spare themselves “the stifling, competitive politeness”?
The Children Act has us consider what it takes to act like an adult.
