Book 10:
The Children of Men by P.D. James (C+)
AAHHHHHH!!!!! This book!!! I'm going to throw it across the room!!! Let me just say that whether you enjoyed the movie based off the book or not... the movie is so much better!
After the reading the book, I would say that the movie that followed is based off the
idea of the book! In the year 2021, the human perception of being invincible is shattered as every male on earth is infertile and the last group of children are now in their mid-20's. A British man "enjoying" a boring life filled with regrets and ponderings about the world is thrown into more craziness than just an infertile world when a woman approaches him to ask his cousin, the Warden and unspoken ruler of England, to amend his corrupt government, which include state-owned porn shops to stimulate desire and carnal relations between the sexes and mass formal suicides for elderly people. When that fails, the woman returns to our main character, Theo, and tells him she is carrying the world's only child.
Here's the dumb thing about the book... In the movie, the woman who comes to Theo for help is not pregnant and is his ex-wife. In that, there is incentive for him to be curious and help her. They've known each other for a long time. They have a history. In the book, the woman who comes forward is the pregnant woman and has no relation to Theo at all. In fact, none of her friends do either. So besides the obvious connection for them to tap him as he's the cousin to the Warden.... why the (
expletive word of your choice) does he help
THEM?
 |
| Clive Owen and Julianne Moore in the film adaptation |
The bizarre and the confusing continue from there as the entire first half of the book is a slow melodrama of Theo talking about life in the 1990's... a life I have and most people who will read the book have experienced. So,
why do you need to write about it?? Page after useless and pointless page continues from there with some detailed and confusing discussion about the relationship between Theo and his ex-wife, whose only role in the book is to point out Theo's many faults as a husband before the great disaster of infertility and to also show how women have flipped out and started using kittens or life-like dolls as a supplement for the now nonexistent children.
The book is dry and strikes me as a brilliant idea without any drive behind it. Many argue that the movie isn't great, but at least Hollywood took a genius idea of "what is a world like without children" and gave it some depth. This could have been a wonderful book if the author had turned it into a nonfiction speal just about a world without children instead of a involving a cast of characters with less personality then the driest of high school history or math teachers. Bursts of brilliance include the paragraphs describing the 2021 idea of sex now that getting pregnant is no longer an option:
"Sex has become among the least important of man's sensory pleasures. One might have imagined that with the fear of pregnancy permanently removed, the unerotic paraphernalia of pills, rubber and ovulation arthimetic no longer necessary, sex would be freed for new and imaginative delights. The opposite has happened. Even those men and women who would normally have no wish to breed apparently need the assurance that they could have a child if they wished. Sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic. Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm acheived but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women's magazines. Women, increasingly critical and intolerant of men throughout the 1980's and 1990's, have at last an overwhelming justification for the pent-up resentment of centuries. We who can no longer give them a child cannot even give them pleasure. Sex can till be a mutual comfort; it is seldom a mutual ecstasy. The government-sponsored porn shops, the increasingly explicit literature, all the devices to stimulate desire-none as worked...(116)"
Or the short paragraph on divorce... This has nothing to do with infertility or the future. It's just an amazing description of the pain that two adults go through with this kind of permanent separation that makes me wonder just how brilliant this writer could be!
"A failed marriage is the most humiliating confirmation of the transitory seduction of the flesh. Lovers can explore every line, every curve and hollow, of the beloved's body, can together reach the height of inexpressible ecstasy; yet how little it matters when love or lust at last dies and we are left with disputed possessions, lawyers' bills, the sad detritus of the lumber-room, when the house chosen, furnished, possessed with enthusiasm and hope has become a prison, when faces are set in lines of peevish resentment and bodies no longer desired are observed in all their imperfections with a dispassionate and disenchanted eye" (115).
The book brings to light a concept most of us have never considered -
what would happen in a world without children? The schools have closed. There are no more teachers, babysitters, pediatricians, or midwives. The world of youth with its new trends, new music is gone. There are no more baby clothes, no more youthful laughter. Even still, some, although few, are glad it's gone.
One of Theo's Oxford professors explained his opinion as: "On the whole I'm glad; you can't mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now, for the rest of our lives, we're going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, the noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed..." (45).
Those few moments of genius writing, however, were not enough to save the book. I suggest that if you want to witness a view of an infertile world... rent the movie. At least, you get to stare a Clive Owen for a couple of hours!!
Works cited from:
James, P.D. The Children of Men. New York: Vintage Books, May 2006. Print.
Part of me wonders if you were ever the person I thought you were. In some ways you have to be. Lisa told me about the person you were in high school, the same person that I thought I knew. Now it seems I've probably created and fabricated personality quirks about you that either don't exist or aren't to that extreme. Sometimes, I get the character you play in my novel mixed up with who you actually are. The person you are... are you a coward for not confronting me yourself and getting someone else to say the "bad" things for you? Are you brave and protective for "saving" your girlfriend from me? Or are you a vindictive, son of a bitch for what we did to her? Because you can bend the truth all you want, lovely, but that doesn't make what we did go away.
After all that's happened though, it's time to move on. You're never going to seek me out and apologize in person. I'm not allowed to. I have to accept that. I want you to know that as sad as this letter sounds I am happy. You might not care, I think you might, but I am happy. My life isn't perfect, but it's better than it was. There's this great guy who takes such good care of me. He's been so patient while I've been dealing with all of this. You two have similar music tastes to a certain extent. I think you'd like that about him. I'm very happy for you. I'm so happy, sincerely happy, that you and her are still together, that you've gotten through all of this and have stayed together... as long as it's for the right reasons. I hope you two last and I wish only the best for you both.
