The Children Act

"The Children Act explores, from the perspective of a High Court judge, a family law case in which the judge’s ruling will determine whether a child lives or dies, and the thorny interaction between the law, ethics, and morality. The book was published prior to several recent high-profile cases in which the courts were required to rule on life-and-death decisions involving desperately ill children, cases which attracted hostile international media attention due to a tsunami of misinformation generated by special interest groups, and is even more valuable in light of the likelihood of similar such cases emerging over the years to come. This novel is as impeccably researched as you would expect given the author, which pleases the legal pedant in me, but its greater achievement still is its illustration of the humanity beating throughout the justice system. Our popular conception of judges tends towards the stereotype of the elderly, other-worldly, fuddy-duddies centuries removed from the realities of the modern world, but the truth is that the majority are brilliant and compassionate people acutely aware of the fact that they bear the weight of decisions that change the course of people’s lives. I would. The engine of the law runs on a fairly toxic cocktail of disturbing subject matter, heavy responsibility and unpredictable long hours, which can spill into and contaminate the happiest personal lives. I think the culture of the legal profession can be difficult for outsiders to understand, which perhaps explains why so many lawyers couple up with colleagues. The idea that, for instance, you are expected to simply cancel a booked-and-paid-for holiday if a trial overruns, or miss a wedding or a funeral at less than a day’s notice, is accepted as par for the course by lawyers; if your non-lawyer partner’s working culture is a healthier, more-boundaried 9-to-5, the two worlds can be hard to reconcile. I am fortunate to have a non-lawyer partner whose patience with my general unavailability and inappropriate dinner-table conversation borders on the saintly, but relationship crises at the Bar are regrettably common. We are, as a profession, belatedly recognising the importance of wellbeing at work and steps are being taken to address the incompatibility between legal culture and family life, but some elements—the stress, the hours, the subject matter—are perennial."

"Ian McEwan is the subtlest of the New Athiests. Most of his novels show that we, as humans, just as we need to live in groups, have a desperate desire to make meaning. Many neo-atheists fail to understand that religion is quite a good way of doing this. Stupid though its beliefs might be, nonetheless it does give us a meaning, which we so desperately need. What’s interesting about The Children Act is that McEwan poses two different ways of making meaning. One is the religious way, and the other is the anti-heroine’s way. She is a high court judge and her way of making meaning is through culture, through playing Bach, through reading, through her beautiful flat with its lovely walnut tables etc. But it’s also through love. As a family court judge, she has to deal with a lot of cases brought up by the opposition between religious fundamentalists and the English secular state. So she has to deal with a case of an orthodox Jewish husband who wants his daughters to be brought up religiously and his wife, who wants them to go to a secular school where they will learn to be lawyers or teachers. Then she has a case of a Catholic family who have Siamese twins and are prepared to let them both die, because if an operation is done, you will deliberately be killing one of them, which is against their faith. She has quite a few cases like that. The case that is at the heart of this book is of a 17-year old boy who is a Jehovah’s Witness, as his parents are. He has leukemia and will die unless he gets a blood transfusion. But Jehovah’s Witnesses do not allow this. You’d think that given McEwan is a New Atheist, this would be a story which is totally unsympathetic to such fundamentalism, but, on the contrary, he is able to show that this, also, is a way of living together and of finding meaning. The lives of the parents of this boy were falling to bits before they discovered this particular religion. The father was drinking too much, he was abusive to his wife, he’d lost his job and so on. Then these two polite young men from America knock on the door and the parents discover a community and a meaning and the father starts running a business. This religion has done them a lot of good, despite the fact that they are actually prepared to let their son die. And the wonderful thing is that the high court judge rules against them, and they are so happy, because they had to follow the beliefs of their religion and yet, of course, they wanted their son to live. She allows them to get out of that dilemma. What McEwan is saying there is that the beliefs are immaterial to the fact that they’ve found a community in what they are doing and they can’t leave it. And the tragedy of the book is that she temporarily converts the boy to her belief that it’s through culture, through playing Bach, that you find your meaning. The boy agrees to that, and goes to visit her afterwards and says look “I’m playing the violin! I’m acting in a play!” But she, the God who separated him from his old community, let’s him down. She can’t provide the love and the community that he needs. He, as a result of being let down by her, returns to his old religion and dies, because his leukemia comes back and he refuses to get a blood transfusion. It’s fascinating because McEwan is still clearly on the side of culture, but he recognizes that it’s a very middle-class, elite culture, and not everyone is going to be able to join it. The boy can, because he is a wonderful poet etc. The parents probably couldn’t. They haven’t had access to that way of creating meaning. So he does understand there is an alternative way — not a way for him and not a way for the high court judge — but it is a way, and the cultural way of meaning could well let you down. The other wonderful thing about the book is that it ends with her turning to her husband — who briefly left her — and feeling that this isn’t the greatest marriage in the world, but it’s love that will unite us and get us through. It’s a terribly moving and sympathetic book. I really don’t think that’s true. It’s only on our deathbeds that we get frightened about death. Until very late, including middle age, we’re not frightened of death. We just don’t think it’s going to happen to us. Early religions didn’t really bother very much about the after-life. In Judaism, for instance, it’s only quite late on in its life, at the time of Jesus, that the after-life starts coming into it. And if you look at pagan religions, it is often just not there. They’re worried about how to live in this life, and how their dead ancestors will influence their life, but they’re not very worried about the afterlife. Again, it’s only with the monotheistic religions that you get gods that are worried about you. With the pagan gods, it was simply a quid pro quo. You gave them a good sacrifice and with any luck they will cure your baldness or you fertility problems. There was no compassion involved and no good behavior required…It’s only with the monotheisms that there are sympathetic Gods, and even then I’m not sure how sympathetic Yahweh and Allah are…"