Manon reviews the long awaited new title by prolific author, Ian McEwan. The Children Act was released today.
There is no one who delves into the repressed, British, upper-class psyche quite like Ian McEwan. In books like Atonement and Saturday, I learnt to love the seemingly well-off characters whose manicured lives had been thrown into turmoil. They were forced to communicate and shift. At moments, their internalisation perplexed me– “why can’t they just talk about it?” I thought – yet simultaneously, this concealed vulnerability was heartbreaking and relatable.
His latest novel, The Children Act, delivers just such a character. We are drawn into the layered existence of Fiona Maye, a respected high court judge: her professional world, her private world, and their unsettling overlaps. Inside her grand London home, Fiona’s marriage to her husband, Jack, is bursting at the seams with unsaid things. She is secretly haunted by a past case, as well as general missed opportunities in her life, causing her to withdraw and clam up. As Jack’s frustration comes to a head, she is called in to assess an urgent and difficult case involving a young Jehovah’s Witness boy with leukaemia. For religious reasons, he is refusing to receive life-saving blood transfusions. The decision of whether or not to intervene rests on Fiona, and marks a dramatic turning point.
As we saw in the meticulously researched neurosurgery of Saturday, McEwan is skilled at taking us inside an elite expertise (admittedly, he has the privilege of an exceptional social circle to tap into for this). In The Children Act, Fiona’s life as a judge is rendered in full colour. Its detailed cases and laid-out reasoning provide contrast and escapism into a clean, logical world for both Fiona and the reader. I felt the same sense of fascination I used to get when reading my flat-mate’s law notes: that rare glimpse into what is usually a fairly exclusive world, and one that is so different from my own.
Words like ‘crisp’ and ‘razor sharp’ are so often used to describe Ian McEwan’s prose, so I won’t elaborate too much, but suffice it to say that this book is no exception. His writing is extremely crafted, yet flows effortlessly. As well as its formal mastery, The Children Act is also testament to McEwan’s psychological astuteness: fear of death in flickering observations of ageing bodies; pride and ego in silent stand-offs. By focusing solely on Fiona and her convoluted exchanges, he manages to pin down the intricacies of human thought and behaviour with satisfying precision. It is something that he does best, and is captivating to read.
