'The Children Act' by Ian McEwen

     Like all McEwan's novels, this is a fascinating and accomplished work. Its protagonist is Fiona Maye, a judge in the Family Division of the UK's High Court. The core of the story--and McEwan is very good at telling a story--is a case she has to decide about a seventeen year old boy whose faith as a Jehovah's Witness leads him to refuse to have the blood transfusion that will save him from death--he is suffering from leukemia. And Fiona is faced with this problematical case just after her husband has announced he wants to have an affair with a much younger woman.


      It's a third person narration, but it is all narrated from inside Fiona's mind, what she thinks, and what she observes. Tessa Hadley (no mean writer herself) comments, "Usually a realist novelist – and the book does in its beginnings feel like realism, more or less – would sample just enough fragments of that legal detail to flavour the narrative with authenticity, while reserving the core of his attention for the character's emotional life and relationships. The novel form is notoriously better suited to conveying the subjective flow of experience, less good at ideas or abstract argument."

     She then goes on to pointy out how well McEwan does both--the realism and the emotional life. Fiona's thinking leads to expositions of some particularly interesting and morally ambiguous cases from the family division. Other set pieces of realism concern a scheme for salt marshes as a defence against coastal flooding, a geologist's apocalyptic vision of the future, and a disenchanted lawyer's account of a gross miscarriage of justice.
McEwan's reproduction of the legal language of Fiona's judgements would suggest he could easily have been a lawyer himself.
    
      Sometimes the writing seems to move above realism into the realm of fantasy: one example is the bedside interview with the dying boy--a beautiful piece of writing. Another is the concert at the Inns of Court, at which Fiona is accompanying a singer colleague, which allows McEwan to show off his musical knowledge.
     Some doubts have been expressed by my partner, Joan, about the ending, which she found very contrived and not convincing. I do not have those doubts.
     And just as a final word: once I started, I kept reading on and off and finished the book in a day, appreciating its reasonable length--221 pages on modestly sized pages.