Hope in the Darkness: The Children of Men in 2021
Written nearly three decades ago, James’s dystopian novel set in 2021 has remarkable parallels to the current state of affairs.
Review by Delaney Thull
Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.” Psalm 90:3
In 2021, the world has been ravaged by a virus. Countries spy on each other’s medical research activities and pour vast resources into scientific institutes. Public policy decisions center around how to handle the elderly and how frequently and for whom testing should be mandatory.
But in P.D. James’s 1992 novel The Children of Men, the mandatory testing is for fertility, and the research focuses on a virus that rendered mankind infertile. In James’s dystopian tale, the last generation of children are born in 1995. The fallout of her virus is a society wrestling with the steady advance of the prospect of an earth without humans.
Set in England, The Children of Men tells of a population seeking comfort and pleasure as they anticipate their own deaths and the complete erasure of their species and culture. The government adopts a “sentimental humanism” and is seen as responsible for preserving stability and protecting people from suffering in their final days. To achieve this, the state provides free pleasures including golf courses, weekly massages, and government-sponsored porn. The regime is authoritarian, led by a Warden and his Council who mandate invasive and humiliating fertility tests, nudge the burdensome elderly towards self-administered suicide kits or euthanasia by ritualized drownings at sea, and handle crime with a system of violent penal colonies and ruthless state police.
There is a special sort of pleasure to be had in reading dystopian fiction in the year it imagines. We feel relief at realizing the world is not quite so bad as James imagined it could be. As a member of the group of children born in 1995 and living into 2021, I am happy to report that I do have younger sisters, and my year-mates have even started to have children of their own. Yet we might also feel a sense of dread as we notice the uncanny mapping between James’s chilling fictional details and the reality of our life in 2021. Like all good dystopian writers, she is perceptive about the social ills of her day and prescient in anticipating their dark implications.
Love changes the way Theo sees the world around him, drawing him to faith.
From the beginning, James’s world takes our modern idols and shows us their hollow cores. Today, we argue about what it means to trust science. We wonder whether science is in tension with religion, whether it can be manipulated by politics, and whether technological innovation ought to be seen with caution or celebration. James eviscerates these debates by imagining a world in which science is brought completely to its knees by an unsolvable problem. The vast rationalist machine of research and international scientific collaboration spends 25 years failing to cure the virus. The novel’s narrator, Theodore Faron, an Oxford don and historian of the Victorian age, calls Western science a god, which “we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us.”
James’s novel is a call to see our modern gods for what that they are. She asks us to remember that we are created beings, to rejoice at the miracle of life, and to realize our dependence on Christ in whom all things are held together. Yet The Children of Men is not just a cautionary dystopian delivery of social critique—nor is it a moralizing story of Christian values. Rather, her tale of a perilous journey captures how the Transcendent manages to break through and transform lives of suffering into gloriously meaningful stories.
Theo, our hero, is an ethical rationalist. When asked about his religious beliefs, he dismisses metaphysics, claiming the only question that we need answer is, “How ought we to live our lives?” and asserting that you do not need religion to find an answer. He disdains the government-sponsored golf and porn, enjoying instead runs in the countryside, travels in Europe, visits to classical sculpture in the Ashmolean, and fine meals of lamb and claret. But his comfortable slide toward death is shattered when he meets a bedraggled fellowship of five reactionaries who resist the soulless regime that rules them and who guard a secret pregnancy. He joins their quest for a safe and secret place for the birth, abandoning his comforts and putting himself at risk to protect Julian, the mother-to-be. At first, when Luke (a quiet Anglican priest) and Julian share Communion in the woods, Theo sees their consecration of the bread and wine as a child’s tea party, the elements spread out on a tea towel with mismatched saucers and a mug and the participants like “two children totally absorbed in some primitive game.”
Yet Theo is changed by his journey. He witnesses violence and murder and experiences betrayal, grief, and love. His heart is softened by his love for Julian. Traveling through the foreboding woods, being hunted by the Warden and his army of helicopters, Theo is heavily burdened by fear and worry. But as they walk, Julian says to him, “Theo look. Isn’t this beautiful?” He reflects, “I only know it’s beautiful; she can feel its loveliness.” He looks, and “seemed to see clearly for the first time… as if in one moment the forest was transformed from a place of darkness and menace… into a sanctuary, mysterious and beautiful.” Love changes the way Theo sees the world around him, drawing him to faith.
James’s account of love, beauty, and faith is transfixing.
The Children of Men parallels the Christ-story of a birth that brings hope to the world, but does so in flawed, bloody, human terms of violence and power. Julian’s baby is eventually born in a dilapidated logging shed. As James’s parallel-Epiphany events unfold, the three rulers who visit the newborn are members of the Warden’s Council, the architects of the cruel regime who came not to worship but to control. To protect the baby and his mother, Theo (whose name means “gift of God”) must kill his cousin, Xan, the Warden of England (whose name means “defender of mankind”). He then removes the “wedding ring of England” from Xan’s hand and places it on his own finger—claiming worldly power and authority. Theo, Julian, and the baby will have no easy road to walk as they wield authority over their fellow humans. Yet with this miraculous new birth and Theo’s submission to God, there is hope again for England, even as the work of government grinds on messily in a lost and broken country. At the close of the novel, Theo joins in the celebration of ancient Sacraments as he baptizes the new baby with water from his own tears and anoints his forehead with the sign of the cross.
James’s account of love, beauty, and faith is transfixing. But her novel’s great strength is not that she calls us to a simple faith, but that she demonstrates such a great understanding of the torment and transcendence of living by faith as fallen people in a dark world.
Delaney Thull is a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
The Children of Men was first published in 1992. You can purchase it from Penguin Random House at their website here.
