Reading Note:
Delayed Reaction
22 June 2015
Two weeks ago, I read Ian McEwan’s latest novel, The Children Act, more than six months after its publication. I don’t think I mentioned it here. There didn’t seem to be too much to say, two weeks ago. I put off reading the book because of the title, which suggested something very unpleasant, along the lines of The Comfort of Strangers; for, having assiduously avoided all reviews, I had no other idea what it might be about. “The Children Act” turns out to be the informal title of a provision of British family law. Put to use as the title of McEwan’s novel, it of course reverberates on a number of frequencies, but the point of departure for the story is that classic contemporary conundrum, the parents who object to the medical treatment of their minor children on religious grounds.
The Children Act lays out the grounds on which a judge may intervene in such a situation, in order to save a child’s life. That is where the protagonist finds herself. She is a respected family-court judge, approaching sixty. Having pursued an ambitious career, she is childless. As a consequence of a recent, far more disturbing decision, involving the urgent separation of Siamese twins, she has become sexually remote from her husband, and her marriage is in trouble.
The child is a bright young man just shy of his eighteenth birthday. His incompetence to decide for himself, and to agree with his parents about the treatment (they are Seventh-Day Adventists, and they object to blood transfusions on Biblical grounds), seems merely technical. The judge decides to examine him herself, to evaluate the quality of his decision in a personal interview. (This sounds like something that American jurisprudence would prohibit, but I’m a long way from law school.) She decides that the boy is in a sort of romantic fit, happily embracing an awful death without understanding just how awful it will be. She decides on intervention, and the boy’s life is saved. For the time being.
The judge is charmed by the boy, but the boy is even more charmed by the judge, and he has none of her sense of professional restraint. Not to mention the mountains of personal baggage that ballast the course of her life, allowing her to snip the encounter as a finished thing. When the boy writes to her, she cannot draft a satisfactory response, so his letter goes unanswered. As does another. Seasoned readers of Ian McEwan will have little difficulty guessing what happens next.
It was only last night, as I was reading something else, that it hit me: I had so often felt like the young man in the story, attracted to smart older people and immediately desperate for more of their company. Like the judge, they were charmed at first, but quickly cautious. Like the young man, I seemed to be putting myself up for adoption. The young man actually proposes that the judge allow him to move in with her. I never went quite that far, I don’t think. But I was drawn to the same sort of thing. What I mean when I say that these appealing adults were sophisticated people is simply that they could see things from two or more perspectives — they could hold contradictory ideas in their minds without irritation, a blessing the absence of which I find tragic. Not only were they comfortable with contradictions, they were often amused by them. There was something vital about the confusion of life, a vitality that made sorting out the confusion worthwhile in spite of the fact that sorting things out usually leads to the proliferation of things to sort out.
My father was (I see now) an extraordinarily tolerant, live-and-let-live kind of guy. But his easygoing nature was also indifferent to what did not concern him. His curiosity had a meter, like a taxi’s. You can make a nice income with that outlook, and he did. What I learned from him at the time — I think I’d have drawn other lessons as an adult — is that compensation corrupted curiosity. It would be best never to be paid for doing anything truly important. In any case, my father could entertain a million conflicting views, as long as they stayed in another room and kept their voices down, so that he could get on with his weekend nap. What distinguished the grown-ups who infatuated me from my father was their giving the impression that they cared. They were, with the best good humor in the world, earnest.
What distinguished these people from my mother, within the frame of this discussion, was everything. My mother liked to make up her mind — “that’s what minds are for,” as Mrs Clancy puts it. “To make up one’s mind” — an interesting expression to which I have never given a moment’s thought; but, now that I do, I see the implication of pretense. The phrase hangs somewhere between “to make the bed” — sorting things out in a very settled way — and “to make up one’s face.” For most of us, I suppose, making up your mind and coming to a decision are the same thing. But they’re not. The true test of adulthood is the ability to come to a decision without being able to make up your mind. We don’t have the luxury of being able to wait until we’ve made up our minds, and it is infantile to act as though we do. Our decisions are unavoidably infected with mistake.
Without exception, each of the alluring adults to whom I was drawn responded to my adulation precisely as McEwan’s judge does. And that was always that. Boarding school seems to have snuffed out the problem. I was too busy writing papers and hearing chamber music to pay attention to anybody else. And the grinding discomfort of living with someone whose habits of mind were so disapprovingly unlike my own came to an end. But my interest still flares up whenever I find myself in the company of someone capable of considering complications with a smile. For better or worse, I’ve learned to curb my enthusiasm.
The Children Act is one of its elegant writer’s most elegant books. I like to think of it as a novella, because the novella, lately, has come to seem to be the most jewel-like of literary prose forms. Or perhaps the most musical (as in sonata form). Themes are limited, and ultimately unitary. (Everything in The Children Act has children in mind.) Something like the classical unities are observed. (The judge leaves London for the North, on business, but this is an episode in a closely-related if contrasting key, and not the expansion of horizon that occurs in many novels.) The good novella is an extraordinarily well-packed suitcase. (The book ends where it began, but the protagonist is now equipped to move on.) I recommend it very highly — and not just because it contains one of the funniest lawyer jokes that I’ve ever heard in my life.