The Children Act
by Ian McEwan
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"Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London presiding over cases in family court. She is fiercely intelligent, well respected, and deeply immersed in the nuances of her particular field of law. Often the outcome of a case seems simple from the outside, the course of action to ensure a child's welfare obvious. But the law requires more rigor than mere pragmatism, and Fiona is expert in considering the sensitivities of culture and religion when handing down her verdicts. But Fiona's show more professional success belies domestic strife. Her husband, Jack, asks her to consider an open marriage and, after an argument, moves out of their house. His departure leaves her adrift, wondering whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability; whether it was not contempt and ostracism she really fears. She decides to throw herself into her work, especially a complex case involving a seventeen-year-old boy whose parents will not permit a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses. But Jack doesn't leave her thoughts, and the pressure to resolve the case--as well as her crumbling marriage--tests Fiona in ways that will keep readers thoroughly enthralled until the last stunning page"-- show lessTags
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Member Reviews
The first page of this book is a classic, an intense study of Fiona Maye, High Court judge, a family law specialist, married, childless. ‘The Children Act’ is the story of a slice of her life and how an upset with her husband coincides with a particular case. Each event impacts on the other and I was left considering how our legal system expects consistent wisdom from its judges when they have human frailties.
Before the story starts, there is a quotation from the Children Act, the piece of law according to which Judge Maye must compose her judgements: ‘When a court determines any question with respect to… the upbringing of a child… the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.’ But for Fiona Maye, her show more involvement with this case goes beyond the courtroom.
Adam is a teenager whose religious upbringing prevents him having a blood transfusion as part of his treatment for leukaemia. Fiona Maye routinely moves from one case to the next, digesting complicated information in an efficient, calm and clinical manner, but something about Adam’s situation is different. Her judgement will effectively decide if Adam shall live or die. She doesn’t know it, but it will also have implications for her own life. Is her decision affected by the fact that, nearing sixty, she is starting to feel her childlessness? As she hides from the stress of her husband’s departure in search of sexual adventure, she buries herself in her documents, in Adam’s case. Does personal judgement combine with her judicial process? Doesn’t it always?
This is a slim book about a difficult subject. McEwan writes without a spare word but his prose is more emotional and intense because of that. He concentrates on the two storylines – Adam’s medical situation, and Fiona’s separation from her husband – without extraneous detail about Fiona’s life. The legal case is set out somewhat drily, but then the law is dry. This is not a John Grisham legal thriller, it is a considered fictional examination of what it is like for a lawmaker to sit in judgement while at the same time retaining the humanity which qualified the judge for the job in the first place.
This cover is my hardback version, a Christmas 2014 gift which has been languishing on my shelf until a friend asked me for my opinion. Why did I wait so long to pick it up?
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ show less
Before the story starts, there is a quotation from the Children Act, the piece of law according to which Judge Maye must compose her judgements: ‘When a court determines any question with respect to… the upbringing of a child… the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.’ But for Fiona Maye, her show more involvement with this case goes beyond the courtroom.
Adam is a teenager whose religious upbringing prevents him having a blood transfusion as part of his treatment for leukaemia. Fiona Maye routinely moves from one case to the next, digesting complicated information in an efficient, calm and clinical manner, but something about Adam’s situation is different. Her judgement will effectively decide if Adam shall live or die. She doesn’t know it, but it will also have implications for her own life. Is her decision affected by the fact that, nearing sixty, she is starting to feel her childlessness? As she hides from the stress of her husband’s departure in search of sexual adventure, she buries herself in her documents, in Adam’s case. Does personal judgement combine with her judicial process? Doesn’t it always?
This is a slim book about a difficult subject. McEwan writes without a spare word but his prose is more emotional and intense because of that. He concentrates on the two storylines – Adam’s medical situation, and Fiona’s separation from her husband – without extraneous detail about Fiona’s life. The legal case is set out somewhat drily, but then the law is dry. This is not a John Grisham legal thriller, it is a considered fictional examination of what it is like for a lawmaker to sit in judgement while at the same time retaining the humanity which qualified the judge for the job in the first place.
This cover is my hardback version, a Christmas 2014 gift which has been languishing on my shelf until a friend asked me for my opinion. Why did I wait so long to pick it up?
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/ show less
“Who’d be a judge!” was the main catch cry at this month’s meeting. It might be over simplifying things, but we all came away from The Children Act with the feeling that a family court judge would have to have one of the hardest jobs going.
We had some mixed feeling about Fiona and Jack. It was clear that they were a high-powered, professional couple with personal issues, but did Fiona let her problems interfere with her judgement when it came to Adam? We think so. She was obviously a very experienced and highly respected figure, (who rarely if ever made a mistake) but our look into her private life showed the cracks, and when Adam’s case came before her, she was really in no fit state to arbitrate.
We have loved McEwan in the show more past, and this novel upholds the exceptional quality of writing we have come to expect from him. The descriptive work and honest human failings is what makes stories like this so captivating. As always, he shirks no responsibility when it comes to his characters. They are all perfectly drawn and wade deep into the issues and circumstances that befall them. The same goes for his themes … tackling the difficult issues seems to be his thing and he is arguably the master when it comes to dealing with the hard side of being human.
There was so much to admire here that to list them would be pointless. Best to simply say, read The Children Act and see what conclusion you come to when faced with personal and professional conflict. If nothing else, it will make you think … and then think again. show less
We had some mixed feeling about Fiona and Jack. It was clear that they were a high-powered, professional couple with personal issues, but did Fiona let her problems interfere with her judgement when it came to Adam? We think so. She was obviously a very experienced and highly respected figure, (who rarely if ever made a mistake) but our look into her private life showed the cracks, and when Adam’s case came before her, she was really in no fit state to arbitrate.
We have loved McEwan in the show more past, and this novel upholds the exceptional quality of writing we have come to expect from him. The descriptive work and honest human failings is what makes stories like this so captivating. As always, he shirks no responsibility when it comes to his characters. They are all perfectly drawn and wade deep into the issues and circumstances that befall them. The same goes for his themes … tackling the difficult issues seems to be his thing and he is arguably the master when it comes to dealing with the hard side of being human.
There was so much to admire here that to list them would be pointless. Best to simply say, read The Children Act and see what conclusion you come to when faced with personal and professional conflict. If nothing else, it will make you think … and then think again. show less
A tough call. Many disagree with reducing the effect of a piece of literature to a simple star rating, but truth be told I do it more for myself and less for others. It's a way of keeping track and a shorthand for the books I enjoyed, or hated, or books that were just middling. A near five-star read for me, this book is written in a register which just works, or does so at least for me. The story of a British High Court judge — specializing in family law? (I can't be sure) — middle age and feeling it, forced to deal with a marriage in strife while she would rather put herself fully into her work, for which she seems to have considerable talent. Novels of manners, novels of the quiet intricacies of family life can go so wrong, so show more easily, that I'm caught off guard when someone gets it exactly right. Not that this is wholly either, but it is a novel of human intricacies, and this is what seems to trip up so many writers. McEwan seems to remember to make the stories interesting, that in fact the greatest writer of them all would poison, or stab, or rape, or to chase by bear if it came to that, and the greatest sin would be to bore, to have people sitting endless in salons chatting in mutual navel-gazing. My favorite novels are when the writer balances the equation, getting both sides right. Here is the story of these people and they are real, or seem so to us — and here is why this story is interesting absent all of that faffing about. I've read two or three or four other McEwan novels (I've lost track) but at this point I've decided to line them all up in row, everything the man has written, and read them every one, over time. I can offer no higher recommendation than that. show less
The title The Children Act has two meanings. One refers to the major piece of legislation governing the decisions of Fiona Maye, a High Court judge whose specialty is family law. The other refers to the actions of the children whose lives she is called to rule upon. However, not just the children, but also the childish, for her husband of thirty-five years has just asked her permission to conduct an affair. When do you go from being your husband's lover to being his mother?
There is no good time to come up with such a request, but this was a particularly bad time in Fiona's work life. Her current case load involved writing decisions that would be used as precedents for years to come. Perhaps that work life was part of the problem. Her show more husband Jack clearly saw it that way. Now, on a Sunday evening, she was faced with making a judgement directing the future of her own family.
Fiona's life was a good one. Her work was stimulating. Her life outside work was a pleasant cocoon of witty friends, concerts, dinner parties, interesting holidays and elegant surroundings, all held together by the polish of good manners. She knew she was lucky, but also knew she had earned it. Her private life was the antidote to the world of personal tragedy and destruction she saw before her at work each day. Now that world promised to become Fiona's.
On the night Jack made his plea for a rediscovery of youth, Fiona was the presiding judge on call. Their verbal sparring was interrupted by a call from a hospital seeking an order to transfuse a child against his wishes and those of his parents. The child Adam was less than three months from his eighteenth birthday, the age of majority. However, the Family Law Reform Act allowed minors of sixteen and seventeen to consent to treatment, which Adam could do despite his parents' wishes.
Adam's legal case is the counterpoint to Fiona's mental case against her husband. On the brink of life, Adam is prepared to deny it, while Fiona, "...an abandoned fifty-nine-year-old woman, in the infancy of old age, just learning to crawl", will fight for her life as she knew it.
McEwan skilfully portrays Fiona's work and home life, as she fights to prevent each from interfering with the other. However, the threatened dissolution of both her worlds had her looking at life from a new perspective:
This is a bleak novel. There are missed chances, unfulfilled dreams, disillusionment and despair, all delivered with McEwan's characteristic restraint. Yet there is hope too. Not the magic wand kind, but rather the kind that believes if only we remain constant to our principles and ideals, we will be able to move forward, not in a blaze of glory, but enough to live with ourselves, and so with others. show less
There is no good time to come up with such a request, but this was a particularly bad time in Fiona's work life. Her current case load involved writing decisions that would be used as precedents for years to come. Perhaps that work life was part of the problem. Her show more husband Jack clearly saw it that way. Now, on a Sunday evening, she was faced with making a judgement directing the future of her own family.
Fiona's life was a good one. Her work was stimulating. Her life outside work was a pleasant cocoon of witty friends, concerts, dinner parties, interesting holidays and elegant surroundings, all held together by the polish of good manners. She knew she was lucky, but also knew she had earned it. Her private life was the antidote to the world of personal tragedy and destruction she saw before her at work each day. Now that world promised to become Fiona's.
On the night Jack made his plea for a rediscovery of youth, Fiona was the presiding judge on call. Their verbal sparring was interrupted by a call from a hospital seeking an order to transfuse a child against his wishes and those of his parents. The child Adam was less than three months from his eighteenth birthday, the age of majority. However, the Family Law Reform Act allowed minors of sixteen and seventeen to consent to treatment, which Adam could do despite his parents' wishes.
Adam's legal case is the counterpoint to Fiona's mental case against her husband. On the brink of life, Adam is prepared to deny it, while Fiona, "...an abandoned fifty-nine-year-old woman, in the infancy of old age, just learning to crawl", will fight for her life as she knew it.
McEwan skilfully portrays Fiona's work and home life, as she fights to prevent each from interfering with the other. However, the threatened dissolution of both her worlds had her looking at life from a new perspective:
It was her impression, though the facts did not bear it out, that in the late summer of 2012, marital or partner breakdown and distress in Great Britain swelled like a freak spring tide, sweeping away entire households, scattering possessions and hopeful dreams, drowning those without a powerful instinct for survival. Loving promises were denied or rewritten, once easy companions became artful combatants, crouching behind counsel, oblivious to the costs. Once neglected domestic items were bitterly fought for, once easy trust was replaced by carefully worded "arrangements".... And the children? Counters in a game, bargaining chips for use by mothers, objects of financial or emotional neglect by fathers; ...
This is a bleak novel. There are missed chances, unfulfilled dreams, disillusionment and despair, all delivered with McEwan's characteristic restraint. Yet there is hope too. Not the magic wand kind, but rather the kind that believes if only we remain constant to our principles and ideals, we will be able to move forward, not in a blaze of glory, but enough to live with ourselves, and so with others. show less
Very much a McEwan story with stalker?, bits of arcane knowledge of the law, marital agonies and all but I was absorbed throughout, particularly with his main character, the woman judge, and the way he got inside her head.
The Children Act is a compelling read; I swallowed it more or less in one gulp. So, three stars for technique and flawless prose.
But beyond those two achievements, there is not a lot to recommend this novel. A structure that plays a tense domestic situation against a professional one full of legal and ethical complexity is a stock formulation. It is ideal for cinema, and I suspect McEwan of putting together a work for publication that is pretty much as camera-ready as it could be without already being a screen play. In terms of fiction writing, he risks nothing and goes nowhere others have not been before.
The book is nakedly manipulative. By this I mean that the emotions McEwan stimulates are in some sense imposed on the characters and show more so are imposed in turn on us. There is a musical thread running throughout the book that acts as a proxy for the main character's state, particularly if one is familiar with the works mentioned. This also is cinematic in that it provides the sound track for shepherding an audience into the desired emotional state. Fiona moves from Bach's second keyboard partita early on to finishing the book with Schubert, Mahler, and Britten's haunting setting of Yeats. From her mix tape we infer her emotional progress.
McEwan also relies on the notion that a vocalist and an accompanist enter into a form of transcendent intimacy that is a truer form of communion than language alone can accomplish. Ideally this is so in a performance; in fiction it is trite and suggests a lazy author. The novel's climax thus turns mawkish as Fiona, overwhelmed, rushes from the stage having brilliantly performed Britten's music for a tenor to sing Yeats's words, but hearing instead a poem in the same form and metre written solely for her that she has just begun to understand. This is cheap stuff. show less
But beyond those two achievements, there is not a lot to recommend this novel. A structure that plays a tense domestic situation against a professional one full of legal and ethical complexity is a stock formulation. It is ideal for cinema, and I suspect McEwan of putting together a work for publication that is pretty much as camera-ready as it could be without already being a screen play. In terms of fiction writing, he risks nothing and goes nowhere others have not been before.
The book is nakedly manipulative. By this I mean that the emotions McEwan stimulates are in some sense imposed on the characters and show more so are imposed in turn on us. There is a musical thread running throughout the book that acts as a proxy for the main character's state, particularly if one is familiar with the works mentioned. This also is cinematic in that it provides the sound track for shepherding an audience into the desired emotional state. Fiona moves from Bach's second keyboard partita early on to finishing the book with Schubert, Mahler, and Britten's haunting setting of Yeats. From her mix tape we infer her emotional progress.
McEwan also relies on the notion that a vocalist and an accompanist enter into a form of transcendent intimacy that is a truer form of communion than language alone can accomplish. Ideally this is so in a performance; in fiction it is trite and suggests a lazy author. The novel's climax thus turns mawkish as Fiona, overwhelmed, rushes from the stage having brilliantly performed Britten's music for a tenor to sing Yeats's words, but hearing instead a poem in the same form and metre written solely for her that she has just begun to understand. This is cheap stuff. show less
The case in front of High Court judge Fiona Maye is not easy – a boy a few months short of his 18th birthday is refusing a necessary blood transfusion because of the faith of his family; they are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Hospital argues that based on The Children Act of 1989, wherein the child’s welfare is of paramount consideration, they should be allowed to override his (and his parent’s) wishes and save him. Maye is intelligent, sensitive, and well-rounded. She can dissect cases in front of her and draw fact-based conclusions, even when those leave her troubled. It’s interesting to see her navigate this and other cases.
However, her own life is also complicated - her husband feels neglected, possibly going through a midlife show more crisis, and is considering (maybe already having) an affair. We see that it’s easier for her to be the third party and judge from a distance, and that even the most intelligent, rational, and sensitive people go through what seem like clichéd acts in plays or stories (and of course life itself). We also see that Maye has to live with the consequences of her decision in the Jehovah’s Witness case – it doesn’t just ‘go away’, and life is messy. I also found it interesting to think about her reaction to the boy falling in love with her, vs. what a man’s would be, what her husband’s would be, if he was the judge and it was a young woman falling for him.
I’ve read eight books by McEwan now, and find that he’s at his best in describing relationships. In this one, the feelings and emotions of the middle-aged couple in their long-term marriage ring true. As always, his prose is clean and direct, and he’s smart and cultured without being pompous or overbearing. Well worth reading. show less
However, her own life is also complicated - her husband feels neglected, possibly going through a midlife show more crisis, and is considering (maybe already having) an affair. We see that it’s easier for her to be the third party and judge from a distance, and that even the most intelligent, rational, and sensitive people go through what seem like clichéd acts in plays or stories (and of course life itself). We also see that Maye has to live with the consequences of her decision in the Jehovah’s Witness case – it doesn’t just ‘go away’, and life is messy. I also found it interesting to think about her reaction to the boy falling in love with her, vs. what a man’s would be, what her husband’s would be, if he was the judge and it was a young woman falling for him.
I’ve read eight books by McEwan now, and find that he’s at his best in describing relationships. In this one, the feelings and emotions of the middle-aged couple in their long-term marriage ring true. As always, his prose is clean and direct, and he’s smart and cultured without being pompous or overbearing. Well worth reading. show less
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ThingScore 58
Ian McEwan, master of obsession, fumbles with his latest, The Children Act
added by Nickelini
McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn’t done so well since On Chesil Beach (2007).
added by Nickelini
Although thrillingly close to the child within us, McEwan nonetheless writes for, and about, the grown-ups. In a climate that breeds juvenile cynicism, we more than ever need his adult art.
added by Nickelini
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Author Information
77+ Works 99,995 Members
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The show more Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell. He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- De kinderwet
- Original title
- The Children Act
- Original publication date
- 2014-09; 2014 (Nederlands) (Nederlands)
- People/Characters
- Fiona Maye; Jack Maye; Adam Henry
- Important places
- London, England, UK
- Related movies
- The Children Act (2017 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- 'When a court determines any question with respect to...the upbringing of a child...the child's welfare shall be the court's paramount consideration.'
Section 1(a) The Children Act (1989) - Dedication
- To Ray Dolan
- First words
- London. Trinity term one week old.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)They lay face to face in the semidarkness, and while the great rain-cleansed city beyond the room settled to its softer nocturnal rhythms and their marriage uneasily resumed, she told him in a steady quiet voice of her shame, of the boy's passion for life and her part in his death.
- Original language*
- Engels
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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