'The Children of Men' was a film that I'd heard a colleague rave about whilst we milked cows together a few years ago: she rated it very highly! I've not got round to seeing it yet, but spotted the novel last time I was in our local Library.
I noticed that it was by P D James, and picked it up having seen Clive Owen's photograph on the cover, wandering if it was the same story.
I am familiar with her Crime writing - she created Inspector Dalgliesh - but hadn't thought of this author as a 'sci-fi' novelist.
So, suitably intrigued, I gave it a go.
Written in the first and third persons, from the point of view of an Oxford history professor, Theo Falon, this is the story of a future society in which human babies stopped being born in the autumn of 1995.
Set in 2021, it starts by giving a portrait of society in England at that time, as seen through Theo's private diary entries.
Theo is the cousin of Xan Lyppiatt, the self appointed autocratic leader (dictator?) of the country, who's been in power for some fifteen years, imposing his great intellect and his strict ethics on a rapidly aging society.
Xan comes from a very wealthy family, and he and Theo spent some formative summers together in the school summer holidays.
Society is made up of two distinct 'classes': those who are dying; and those who are the 'Omega' or last generation, all in their mid twenties, marginalized, remote and violent - there is some resonance of William Golding's 1954 novel of youth descending into tribal barbarism - 'Lord of the Flies' - painted outlaw warriors feature in a key (manacing and very violent) scene in the book.
Mankind has been dedicating research efforts to trying to find out why human beings stopped reproducing, and to find a 'cure'- woman and men are routinely tested for fertility, and the problem remains a mystery - the author gives us no reasons for the 'curse' that has affected the globe, adding to the underlying terror of the novel.
In order to try and right the issue, young people are revered, pornography is licensed and encouraged by government, and puppies (and kittens) are treated like 'babies', with special parties and much jealousy surrounding their whelping It is a hope-less society: there are secret police; an authoritarian government; the Isle of Man a penal colony, cut off from the mainland and starving to death; Viking style, seaborne, government-sponsored mass 'suicides' of the elderly; the abandonment of villages and remote habitation; the emptying of storehouses; in short, society and civilization are crumbling, decaying around a doomed race.
Cheery stuff, no? Into this comes a small, secretive group calling themselves the 'Five Fishes'.
One of them, Julian (that's a woman) contacts Theo, simply because he is the cousin of the country's de facto leader (fuehrer?), who might be able to put their point of view (reforms) across to him - after all he was once an 'advisor' to the 'Warden', Xan.
Theo's meeting is not a success, the secret police become involved, and this forty-something divorced don embarks on an adventure involving love, birth, pursuit, ambush, tragedy, barbarity and a whittling of the group from six to three.
Set mostly in and around the city of Oxford, and the crumbling roads to Wales, with memories of a country house childhood, the pictures are well painted in your imagination by this excellent author.
I like to read a book where you occasionally have to pick up a dictionary - this is a book like that! It deals with relationships: divorce, bereavement, and the breakdown of marriage.
The novel explores the feelings of a lonely academic, at odds with the world as it has become, the whole aging hopelessness the world, his world, has come to.
We see him questioning society, human relationships, and the future? We see him falling in love, and realising something about that too.
This short extract attracted my attention: describing a failing marriage it hits the nail on the head - you'll find the novel full of this kind of insight into life, death and relationships.
"Did you love your wife?" "I convinced myself I did when I married.
I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feeling were.
I endowed her with qualities she didn't have and then despised her for not having them.
Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own" There is a hopeful ending.
You can almost smell the wood smoke, the trees, the fear in the final scene, and yet hope and love prevail - excellent stuff!