The Children of Men (1992)

This hovers between three and four stars for me, but ultimately gets three because it felt dry. I liked some of the imagery, and I liked the ideas, but the writing failed to have urgency for me. The lead-in was long, but that didn't make it tense for me.

I'm not saying it's not interesting to read, though. I polished it off in a day, in exactly the same way as An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. It just never caught fire in my head, never really became a compulsion to keep on reading. The characters never felt alive to me, even with all the detail about them. ( )

Normally I read the book long before anyone even thinks about making a movie, but in this case I read the book a few years after seeing the movie. It was quite a shock, because this novel is a very different kind of dystopia than the film. I am still sorting out how I feel about it. Much more thoughtful than the movie and in a strange and depressing way more realistic. ( )

"Get used to it. Why the hell should you escape guilt? It’s part of being human. Or hadn’t you noticed?" ( )

"Told with P. D. James's trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling"...


I have wanted to read this book for a long time. I loved the movie. I thought it was brilliant, exciting, suspenseful and terrifying all at once. It was everything the book should have been... but was not.

What the book was, unfortunately, was big stretches of yawn interspersed by long-jumps of "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we fucking there yet?" and little bunny-hops of "Oh, that's interesting" moments.

As a dystopia, the world that James created is plausible, perhaps even likely, should the events that changed the world come about in our own reality. Mens' little swimmers forgot their floaties, and thus the race is more of a floundering then a sinking, then a dying off. No more babies. Wonder if anyone checked where the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement people were in Omega year 1995, eh? Sprinkling a little sumthin' in the water? Hmmmm?

I digress. The world... plausible. But I just really couldn't bring myself to care. It was hard to give a crap about really anyone in this book, including humanity in general. I didn't care about the fact that the whole world was dying because I didn't give a shit that the individuals shown in the book were dying. Everyone was so despicable and shitty. Julian was maybe the only exception, but despite her desire to change things and do something better for the world, I still just didn't care.

I'm supposed to care about a world when the lens I get to see it through is so covered in shit I don't even want to stand downwind of it? A man whose only thought for his 27-years-dead toddler daughter is that she was an inconvenience anyway? Really? He can't find ONE positive thing about his own daughter in almost 30 years?

I liked Theo Faron in the movie. He was maybe selfish, maybe not the nicest guy, but he was real, and I liked him. His book character? Not so much. I found it very, very hard to even muster up a little meh for him, even when he comes around to the "good guys'" team. You know... until he takes the One Ring for himself, that is.

Ugh, and don't even get me started on Theo's diaries.



You kind of expect historians to be a little dull. Introverted, selfish asshole historians to be duller still. But wow. Seriously, fucking wow, were Theo's diary entries duller than shit. Do I need a minute by minute recap of how he spent his adolescent summers at his cousin's estate house? No. Please no. Please. Establish the history in a flashback, in a home video, in a memory, in... something, ANYTHING, other than the diary entries of man who has nothing at all better to do with the unlimited vocabulary, time and Bic pens at his disposal than write the most trivial boring bullshit diary that will never ever be read ever. Except by me.

FML.

This book gets this many stars. ( )

After a slow start, this sci fi dystopian novel progressed to becoming an absorbing and thought-provoking look at what holds civilization together. Much less of a thriller than the movie and a completely different and blacker ending. ( )