The Death of Birth with a glimmer of hope – Remarks on P.D.James’ “Children of Men”
In her novel, Phyllis D. James (U.K., 1920-2014) describes humanity facing extinction: for 25 years, no child has been born. This “universal infertility” remains throughout the book quite mysterious: science can’t quite explain its causes nor find or develop a cure.
The “impending end of our species” happens while Western Science is demoralized and humiliated by this failure: for 25 years, since the event described as “Omega”, the Earth has been emptied of births and nothing could fix it – neither artificial insemination nor facilities to test the sperm of “healthy, selected males” (as Xan Lyppiatt, Warden of England, puts it).
Less science-fiction and more fiction about the future of Science as a decayed god, the novel pokes fun both at sciences inability to find us a way out of the mess and at those opportunistic end-of-times prophets selling salvation – a commodity that still finds its buyers among the ageing, childless population.
Published in 1992, the story is set in 2021 and its tale is told through the journal of Theo Fardon, an historian traumatized by an accident in which he ran over and killed his own daughter. An omniscent narrator also takes oven the helm of the narrative to describe how Theo gets involved with a clandestine network of five rebels who persuade him to talk to his long timed friend, the all-powerful Lord of England, Xan.
(67)
Xan is England’s supreme authority and the rebels accuse him of being a tyrant masquerading as democratic leader. We can savour the writer’s feminist critique of him, delivered through Theo’s Journals, when Xan’s court is described as “guarded, cooked for, driven, serviced by a small company of his private army” (p. 121).
Theo is bold enough to confront Xan only after he has seen/witnessed a QUIETUS – a ritual where old people die in a sort of state-sponsored mass euthanasia. “Are we culling our old people now like unwanted animals? (…) Is this death w/ dignity?” (p.133)
The social system also relies on “Sojourners”: “we treat them as slaves”, Theo says (p.137) – and the highest authorities gather to deliberate at the Council. An inside look at its inner workings is given us in chapter 12, when Theo gets inside it. Carl teaches him about evil, brief lifespan, and that “without hope of beast h 2 Future he becomes a careless for the planet (p.139).
This book frightens us with the advance of senility without infancy; people getting older without new children being born; the death of birth, but with a glimmer of hope.
The most interesting aspect of the novel is the sense of impending doom connected to lack of birth as seen through the prism or perspective of a protagonist, Theo, which is an historian specialized in Victorian age U.K. (p.151) perished is “the conviction that the whole of man’s life could be lived in harmony with the natural world” (p.151).
Utopia is dead and gone; the historian nowadays has to face up to the facts of extinction which are also a major part of Nature’s past. A brief discussion about why the dinosaurs perished occurs in ch. 14 – Theo remembers his primary school teache. statin’ that those animals “had been all body but little brain; and had failed to adapt and had perished.” (151)
But Theo thinks the dinos “had survived for a couple of million years”; mankind could prove to be a far “quicker” to vanish anind species (152); the demise of the human race and our inability to cope with the task of collectively dying with dignity is the red thread that traverses P. D. James book. But hope rears its head, after all; a pregnant woman runnin’ from the claws of the British State gets frontrow in the novel’s 2nd half. In the dystopic hopelessness she has depicted, where even the “yearning for martyrdom” seems useless (155), a ray of light shines…
Hope also shines through the rebellion led by The 5 Fishes; their manifesto (p.158) claims: “if our race is to die, let us at least die as free o’ and q devils. There’s a good death and a bad death … not as in the lives of individuals, collectives, and animal species. Besides words, they work through deeds – like sabotage by ” ramps blown up” against 2 Quietus rituals (p.175).
Melancholy remarks abound which remind one of Nietzsche’s words in “Truth and lies…. there’s also sad thoughts shared about failed marriages “love or lust at last dies” (p.162), but P.D. James can’t help but sell us hope, propelling forward her action with the baby-in-uterus stratagem. JULIAN’S WOMB
Book 2 (p.193-342) tells this cinematic, eventful
P thriling After thousands ofolsetes hopeless prayers, (195) to the Virgin Mary and other idols… finally a woman. gets pregnant! She fears Xan and its absolute power; she doesn’t want to become a tool for the Warden’s media spetacle. Theo is at 1st skeptical; he fears Julion is another woman “deceived by hope” (215). But inside the novel the child is real, not a deceit, not a product of wishful thinking. It concerns “the whole world” as “the first of a new race”; its appearance ellicits the word pumping up: miraculous; “miracle child” (219). Life and faith insist. The conatus rages jes on. A secret fear: what if the newborn turns out to be… a MONSTER? (p.237)
Theo and Rolf clash, with divergent opinions, when it comes to the hope embedded in Julian’s womb; it’s quite ironic that P.D. James calls the novel “Children of Men”
instead of “Children of Women”, or “Children of Humankind. The males of the homo sapiens species want to rule over the fruits of those uterus that have grown progressively barisn. Who’s to blame? In the war of the sexes, the male sperm, grown massively infertile, stands accused; and Rolf seems to think of himself as exception to the almost universalized rule or condition; Theo dislikes Rolf’s presumptions; also refuses his ideology of a “new race” through Rolfian eugenics (p.236); Theo wants to poison his delight as Jago wanted to do against Otelo and Deslemonz; thus the menace of the monster:
p.236 – I can father the new race.. There’ll be tremendous competition for fertile sperm…
1 p. 237 – It may be luckien for you if the child is abnormal, deformed, on idiot, a monster…
Rolf dreams of glory, of being the new Adam or Noah, the patriarch of the new race of men; Theo disdains of that and recalls that the Warden (Xan) will never give up his power
THEO
GOD DEBATE
(p.244)
ROLF
Miriam, whóll help Julian in childbirth at the shack in the woods, is experienced in the practice and theory and history of women’s birthing processes; she teaches Theo “Women have given birth in war, revolutions, farming, concentration camps, on the march.” (205) By reading this I couldn’t help but recall the mothers in Gaza; distopia for real in Rafah, Khan Younis or Jabalia…
Julian’s desire is to avoid being catched by the Powers That Be; she doesn’t want to be famous; she doesn’t want to be bearing child live on TV while “Xan presides and gives the news to an incredulous world” (278); jhe would rather be in the wilderness, surrounded by Miriam’s sorority / solidarity, than to be in the limelights of mass media and a tool of political marketing… This mother-to-be is also anguished – will this child be able to reproduce? (p.308) Julion, by the end of the tale, cries for the death both of the father (Luke) and Miriam (p.332); Thes, confronting Xan, kills the power aiming to “Capture” the “mirade child” and turn it into a power-increasing uper tool (p. 337). Xan had called the child of: whore” before being shot through the heart! Theo vidently usurps power for himself as last measure; he claims the sapphire ring; it’s suggested hes “intoxicated of power; it’s power: he baptizes w/ blood and tears a child forehead he drows the sign of the wors an on whose…
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P.D. JAMES talks
Publicado em: 21/08/25
De autoria: Eduardo Carli de Moraes educarlidemoraes
