The Children of Men – P.D. James

A worldwide blight of male infertility means that the human race is slowly but steadily dying out. Rather than a global catastrophe set to wipe us out in short shrift, what makes the premise so powerful and the book’s drama so different is the timing: how long there is left.
 
Crime novelist P.D. James speculated on how a society might behave under such a collective death sentence and The Children of Men was what she came up with.
 
Although it is set thirty years in the future, James describes pretty much the fabric of the real England of 1992 in which she wrote, which makes the story compellingly credible. The English answer to their existential predicament is to install an oppressive police state to maintain order, while managing their slow but inescapable demise. The country has degenerated into a sinister and dismal place. Squalor is the ubiquitous norm.
 
To preserve resources for the younger, citizens who reach sixty are supposedly encouraged, but in fact drugged and herded, to mass suicides: ceremonial drownings called Quietus. The last children ever to be born, called Omegas, who are indulged by law, act disappointingly selfishly. In Bexhill-on-Sea of all places (an inspired choice!), a so-called refugee camp is a detention centre where detainees are abused in every way by camp guards.
 
Meanwhile, for many people there is no immediate panic, of course, and everyday life goes strangely on. It is this absurd normality that gives the book its unique tone and underlying tension. Reflection is that much more poignant when you know that there is to be no future. I was gripped from the first page.
 
The ones who are alive now are the last. When the youngest extant generation dies out, that will be it. A few decades at most… but for each person, it means their entire lifetime, which is all we ever have! The thought experiment, then, confronts us with the realization of how much our individual lives are predicated on hopes for a future in which we will not exist.
 
James, the expert crime writer, knows how to build suspense and also explore motivation, so that when the reluctant Theo acts to aid political resistance to the dictatorial regime of his cousin, we know that it is from compassion. With Theo, James presents us with a redemptive desire for selfless acts. While no religious undertone is intended or perceptible, (spoiler alert) Theo accompanies the stricken and pregnant Julian like a modern-day Joseph and Mary with a miracle birth imminent.  
 
The film of the book is worthy of special mention. It is all gritty realism with striking imagery and respectfully faithful to the spirit of the book. P.D. James approved of it. Director Alfonso Cuaron called it “the anti-Blade Runner” as the depicted future is not futuristic but grimly and grimily familiar, making it only too believable. In different backgrounds you have Picasso’s Guernica, a Banksy, “Arbeit Macht Frei” by The Libertines, Pink Floyd’s inflatable Battersea pig referencing Orwell’s Animal Farm, and in Bexhill, now a desolate, dangerous war zone, a detained refugee in a hood is chillingly reminiscent of TV footage of Abu Graib prison in the Iraq War.
 
It could never happen in England, could it?