The Children of Men by P.D. JamesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Protection, comfort, pleasure. There has to be something more."
"It's what people care about, what they want. What more should the Council be offering?"
"Compassion, justice, love."
"No state has ever concerned itself with love, and no state ever can."
"But it can concern itself with justice."
***
It was a jolt to open the book to page 1 and read the date of a journal entry: Friday 1 January 2021.
Written in 1992, James' dystopia in 2021 is set in a world where women haven't given birth in 25 years. And science cannot figure out why.
Consider me a new fan of P.D. James. What a blend of beauty of language with suspense! She builds a very credible (and thus a very horrible) world and touches on many themes, on politics, sex, mortality, and ethics, trying to answer the question: of what use is all human endeavour when our race has been marked for extinction?
"Every age has its cruelties."
In protagonist Theo Faron's England, he is cousin to the Warden-slash-Dictator, who rules all in an attempt to provide a dignified way of life to the middle-aged... at great cost to humanity's humanity.
Imagine going to a concert, but because there are no longer any boy sopranos around, the conductor merely presses a button to play a recording.
Imagine a world where half-mad women dress up kittens and dolls and act our their fantasies of motherhood in public.
All of these benign horrors are nowhere near the full scale nightmarish world that P.D. James builds, where the "useless" old are exterminated -- voluntarily for some but not for all; the last generation to be born pampered ("If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils."), and the middle-aged turning a blind eye to human rights abuses for the sake of their creature comforts.
Definitely not for young audiences, this book is a sci-fi classic! I can't wait to watch the 2006 Alfonso Cuaron film!
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