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How not to talk to grown ups: Ian McEwan’s The Children Act

How it feels to not be able to communicate is a hard thing to communicate, but Ian McEwan has made a career out of doing so. His plots sprint off from where his characters’ conversations stumble into misunderstanding. Partially, these misunderstandings are the result of the particular kind of Englishness his characters generally possess; it is the kind of Englishness which takes its dog for a walk after finding its wife has been unfaithful, the kind which screws up the love letters it has been writing all afternoon. The first sentence of his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach illustrates this superbly: ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.’ Yet McEwan’s characters are also unable to speak their minds because they do not know their minds, nor their hearts; only McEwan, with his shrewd Freudian eye, and his pen tracing their most repressed thoughts, knows what really motivates them. Even the tightest lid will let off steam, and no matter how emotionally hunched up these characters are they never succeed in battening down their unconscious urges for long. Reading McEwan’s best books we vaguely forebode the character’s coming crisis, but cannot predict what form it will take; we are surprised by how it happens, not by its happening.

Unfortunately his latest book, The Children Act, is not one of those books. It is a slim novel, standing on its tip toes so as not to be categorized as a novella, which concerns a few months in the life of Fiona Maye, a high court judge whose husband leaves her for a younger (and, it quickly turns out, uninterested) woman, and whose professional life swamps her private life with a series of morally perplexing court cases. The plot begins just as Fiona’s husband tells her he wants to have an affair, but from here it expands chronologically in both directions, digressing to a court case several weeks past concerning two Jewish children whose father wants to shield them from a modern education, and progressing forwards towards a case to give a grievously ill Jehova’s Witness a blood transfusion, against his parents’ wishes.

‘Digressing’ might seem a needlessly negative word, but the way in which the plot wades into Fiona’s past makes it unwieldy. McEwan ballasts every halting progression in time with pages and pages of flashback-exposition. This is irritating, especially as McEwan has previously shown how supplely and economically he can convey the conditions which formed his characters’ personality. When reading his 1990 novel The Innocent we learn how sheltered the main character’s life has been so far from the first wry sentence in which he is mentioned: ‘Leonard Marnham, an employee of the Post Office, had never actually met an American to talk to, but he had studied them in depth at his local Odeon.’ In The Children Act, McEwan is rarely so tersely brilliant, because he does not trust the reader to be so discerning.

Every novel has a hypothetical implied reader – the kind of reader who is just discerning enough to understand why the author has written what is written and not otherwise. The implied reader of Finnegan’s Wake is an anal-retentive genius with an attention span of twenty years and an encyclopedic knowledge of a dozen languages and three thousand years of literature. He is, in other words, James Joyce himself. The implied reader of The Children Act, by comparison, is a humble figure. In fact, he’s a bit dim. He needs things to be explained to him, all of the time. Which is good, because that’s exactly what McEwan’s narrator does – all of the time.

So often, when his character’s feelings are made perfectly clear by what they say and how they act, he burdens his prose with unnecessary explication. ‘I’m not the one about to wreck our marriage’, Fiona retorts to her husband’s attempt to shift the blame, to which he responds ‘so you say.’ That this is an attempt to exploit her insecurities is needless to say– but McEwan does say so, at length. Her husband, he writes, ‘said it reasonably, projecting the three words deep into the cave of her self-doubt, shaping them to her inclination to believe that in any conflict as embarrassing as this, she was likely to be wrong.’ This tells us nothing that hasn’t already been implied, and the metaphor of the cave is ill chosen. McEwan uses it because caves are generally empty. But Fiona’s self-doubts are not cave-like, they are not a vessel to be filled; they themselves fill her mind to the point of overflowing. In fact, the story itself progresses through their overflow into her public life. This passage is not a one off –McEwan’s narrator is always barging in on the tenderest of scenes, third-wheeling on lovers and mourners, with his impromptu lectures and his cack-handed metaphors.

McEwan also seems to be under the impression that we are unable to remember what he wrote five pages ago. This is no exaggeration: on page 140 he tells us ‘Teenage visits to her Newcastle cousins had been her only adventures’, then on page 145, ‘She had a history with Newcastle and felt at ease here. In her teens she had come several times.’ I imagine any goldfish who happen to pick up The Children Act will find this kind of repetition helpful. But humans are likely to find it annoying.

Yet in its favour, Children Act does present us with a set of characters who are imaginably human. This has always been McEwan’s forte, and his ability to do so shows no sign of waning. The only caveat I would place on this judgement is that Fiona seems too conveniently able to articulate her feelings; this too is a way in which McEwan mollycoddles the reader. The plot of The Children Act advances in such a way as to make Fiona, and by extension the reader, question the supremacy of her atheistic belief system above other such systems. In real life, we do a great deal of our thinking about such questions as this without realising we are doing so. Changing one’s religious or political beliefs is not something which happens in an instant. About these matters there are no Demascene moments; there are only moments when we realise we have already changed our minds. This is especially true of people who, like Fiona, would rather not have to bother thinking about such humongous questions, who would rather their lives were not complicated by their own emotions. At the bedside of the ill, devout, and portentously named Adam, Fiona realises that ‘Religions, moral systems, her own included, were like peaks in a dense mountain range seen from a great distance, none obviously higher, more important, truer than another’. This realisation is too unanticipated to be believable, which is especially a shame because, as mentioned earlier, McEwan has previously done a brilliant job of making developments in his characters both surprising and concordant with their pasts. Here McEwan obviously intends to express Fiona’s own feelings through the third person, rather than the thoughts of some distant, omniscient narrator, but these same feelings are so neatly and articulately expressed that they read as if they were the narrator’s. Such moments break our suspension of disbelief, and remind us that she is, in fact, just a fictional construct.

I finished The Children Act asking the question no author ever wants their readers to ask: is this bad novel just a blip, or does it represent a more general decline in its writer’s artistic powers? I don’t know, but the irritating aspects of this book are not new to McEwan’s work. His nannyish attitude towards the reader, his need to calibrate the entire plot towards the conveyance of an ideological point, and deleterious effect of these faults on his characterisations, have been present in his writing at least since 2007’s On Chesil Beach. McEwan has much affection for the reader but less respect. For this reason, The Children Act is not likely to inspire the reader with much respect for him, either.

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