Several years ago, probably when it was first published in 2014, I read a review of The Children Act, a novel by Ian McEwan, and I remember thinking that it sounded like a book my boss might enjoy. Last Saturday I was at the library with the kids and I saw it on display, so I checked it out for myself, and I don't think the old boss could have enjoyed it any more than I did.
The main character is what we on this side of the Atlantic would call a family court judge. Fiona Maye, however, is English, childless, buttoned-up, humorless, 59, a longtime practitioner of earnest ambition that has landed her somewhere near the top of her profession, though with an unhappy husband who, as the novel opens, has asked leave to pursue a sexual relationship with a much younger woman who works with him. He knows exactly how long it's been since he and Fiona were intimate: 50 days. She calculates that this would put it back in a period during which she was considering a case of Siamese twins, whether a surgery that would for sure kill one should be permitted in order that the other might live. The medical testimony, including forensic photography of the conjoined and disfigured twins, had not promoted ardor. It's evident that her sexual temperature runs low anyway. Her husband says she's "no fun" and has "lost the art of play," which, however one may feel about his application for a variance, appears accurate.
Fiona's attitude toward family court litigants has included a measure of aloof disdain. They aren't as smart as she, their lives are a mess, and they're making things worse by adopting imprudent legal strategies meant to compensate them for their bitterness. Now, with her husband out of the flat, her own anger is at war with a desire to preserve the marriage. When the former is ascendant, she is subject to the same frailties she condemns in others; and when the latter is ascendant, her calculations and guile are not very attractive, either. At the same time, there isn't anything the reader dislikes about her that she hasn't noted and disliked herself. The two strands of the narrative, very skillfully interwoven, concern her marital drama and a new case she has to decide, one involving a boy, a Jehovah's Witness, who is with his parents declining a blood transfusion needed to treat his leukemia. Though the novel isn't long, part of the pleasure is the incidentals, including some courthouse banter. Here's a lawyer joke, from page 56:
"A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he's absolutely certain. Oh, but how can you be so sure? Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk. But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless? Well, comes the answer, it's possible he could have been alive and practicing law. . . ."
Comments