A couple of months ago, several Murchisons rented the DVD of Children of Men, the thennew Alfonso Cuarón movie. At home, in front of our own television set, we watched soberly. I may have watched more soberly, not to say more skeptically, than the others. That would be because I was literally following Hollywood’s breezy injunction from the ’50s: “You’ve read the book. Now see the movie.”

I’d indeed read the book when it was published in 1993. I’d liked it a lot, for reasons I will note shortly. By contrast, I disliked the movie considerably. Not because it played fast and loose with the excellent P. D. James plot. Remember Samuel Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights, which cut the Bronte novel squarely in half, finishing with a ghostly and wholly invented reunion of the suffering lovers? Good book; good movie, for all their differences. What about the screenwriters who economically pruned two of Scarlett O’Hara’s children? You have contrasting functions to serve when it comes to books and movies. We all know this. We let it go. We forgive—now and then with undue generosity.

The problem with Children of Men was a missed opportunity to say more or less what the James book—The Children of Men—had said with special eloquence and excitement about, well, the centrality of babies in human affairs. Let us toughen that a bit: the pure, absolute indispensability of babies in an age more and more given to clapping hands over eyes as the birth function loses priority to the imputed joys of aloneness and aloofness.

Ex malo bonum, I am wont to say concerning the movie: dark, dingy, weird, more concerned with explosions and Problems of the Moment, such as immigration and, inferentially, the Iraq war, than with the childless future P. D. James had imagined and invited us to contemplate. Out of bad may come good if a defective movie stirs customers to see what the book was all about, as could prove the case here, you never know. Do questions get more absorbing than how would life look—would it be life at all, and how would we live it—were the blessing of new birth to be taken from us, suddenly, mysteriously?

I cannot without fear of censure kick Cuarón around the room; I have discovered that quite a few viewers of his product like or at least respect its cinematic qualities—my wife among them. A graduate of Indiana University’s esteemed theater department, she recollected for me Goethe’s criteria for theatrical merit. First, what was the author trying to do? Then, did he do it? Finally, was the thing worth doing? This she occasionally (as well as goodhumoredly) does when I am looking narrowly down my narrow nose at artistic ventures postdating Samuel Johnson. Or John Wayne. I had to admit that Sr. Cuarón did what he set out to do—render a joyless judgment on the nearterm future of humanity in the environmental, political, and cultural realms. My question, nevertheless: Why this book as take off point? Why appropriate such a fine work and muffle its alarm bell? Before him Cuarón had a richly imagined tale concerning the sudden, the unlookedfor, the catastrophic failure of procreation. All at once, no more human babies. None anywhere. In 1993, P. D. James was vaguely understood to be religious—an active communicant of the Church of England— but the present tale hardly fitted common understandings of her as a sophisticated spinner of detective tales. She would write later that alone among her novels The Children of Men failed to earn back its advance, “a depressing and somewhat demeaning thought.”

It was anything but an addition to her bookshelf of Adam Dalgliesh stories, with the poetpoliceman digging for truth and certainty amid a heap of moral ambiguities and disturbing evidences of human failing. James’s project, in the Dalgleishless The Children of Men, was certainly arresting. No births, no babies for a quarter of a century, starting in 1996. She had read in the Sunday Times a book “dealing with the dramatic and so far unexplained fall in the fertility rate of Western man.” She wondered: What if the human race were “struck by a universal infertility”? She saw a gradual falling away of hope and expectation; the replacement of adventure by ruin; a world steadily running downhill, crumbling to the touch, “all hope and ambition lost for ever,” the meaning of life itself quite gone.

In such a world, women wheel dolls around in buggies and bring cats to church for baptism. On another societal fringe, the elderly and basically defunct are subjected by the state to the cruel and bizarre Quietus—mass death by deliberate drowning as bands serenade the victims with songs of the World War II era.

Meanwhile, in the womb of one young woman, unborn life unexpectedly returns. And dramatic consequences flow torrentially.

What, then, did Cuarón, the Mexican director best known for his handling of the Spanishlanguage flick Y tu mama tambien, and of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—what did Cuarón do with the copious material at hand? What he mainly did (besides axing “The” from James’s title) was apply himself to the creation of a 21stcentury nightmare concerning pollution, dictatorship, bombings, prison camps (think Abu Ghraib), and the oppression of immigrants (think—I guess—Tom Tancredo). Oh, yes, and the lack of new babies. How the world got this way the audience isn’t sure. Environmental factors may have played their part. It’s a pretty awful world, we recognize quickly enough.

So, Herr Goethe, what was the artist trying to do? In the present case, he was trying to show us the consequences of political and environmental trends he saw as already afoot. The movie starts in 2027 with an urban bombing, al Qaedastyle. Boom! Smoke pours from a nearby door. Turmoil ensues. And continues. The movie concludes with nearly all the main characters recharacterized from the novel—dead. (James isn’t known for delicacy in the dispatch of victims, but her books hardly qualify as literary slaughter houses, à la Cormac McCarthy. Cuarón, by contrast, seems bent on getting rid of pretty much everyone.)

In an advertising feature published in The New York Times, the director spread out the reasons for his treatment of the material. “I wanted to convey what’s happening in the world,” he said, “from the perspective of great minds who specialize in the fields of environment, population, and economics, as well as philosophers and critics of society. They offer a diagnosis about the reality we’re living in. The picture is not a happy one; but, OK, now we know the reality, we know where we’re standing, what can we do.”

So in Goethe’s terms, yes—the artist draws us a picture of dystopia, bidding us look on in horror. That’s easy enough. In place of James’s downattheheels yet nevertheless civilized Oxford, we look perpetually at gray brown desolation. Do we wonder what it all has to do with children, or the absence thereof? Only (for my money) when ClareHope Ashitey (as Kee, a character not in the book) becomes mysteriously pregnant and her antigovernment associates convey her, at immense cost to themselves, to the keeping of a shadowy, neverexplained entity called the Human Project, whose base is some kind of Greenpeacelooking ship. Far as I can tell anyway.

Children of Men won early accolades and a lot of buzz. At the Venice Film Festival, a blogger reported, “The crowds were all in shock. There were many people crying.” Surely, reported someone else, who had evidently been in a different mood when the lights went down, this was “one of the best action movies we have seen lately.” Another blogger expressed satisfaction that “the religious overtones” of the book had been “played down.” (Omitted would be more like it. Unless I misremember, religion is represented in the movie by the exclamation, “Jesus Christ!”)

Still another commentator mentioned the triumph of “hope over hopelessness.” That would be right, I think. From a wornout world, the new mother (who in the movie is black rather than white, as in the novel: for reasons likely calibrated by Cuarón to fit the exhaustion of European civilization) is raised from desperation to fulfillment. She’s got something no one else has—a baby! With babies, well, you know . . . .

That’s it, perhaps. We don’t know, at least not in the way we once did: “we” meaning humanity. We have to raise our eyes a bit—look at the stakes in a way not entirely obvious amidst the haze of pollution and the hail of bullets (as we old newspapermen used to say). We move from movie to book, if properly invited to do so, as I believe we have been by the intrusion of this wellacted but depressing movie. We start to think—maybe—what’s this thing all about anyway? This life thing, this vision of the sterility to come, maybe. What could there be to the preposterous notion of a time when a woman can’t get pregnant, hard as she may try, deeply as she may yearn? Oh, the idea has its inviting side. Who wants condoms, now that risk has disappeared from the equation? Come on—take, get, grab, satisfy, appease. It was never so good in HaightAshbury or Greenwich Village. And it’s all free—provided by “free,” you imply, as P. D. James surely does, the cool disregard of purpose and meaning in the sexual act. Only a few lines into The Children of Men, purpose recedes. I don’t mean artistic, Goethean purpose. I mean human purpose. The narrator, Dr. Theo Faron, of Oxford University, 50 years old, relates:

We have had twentyfive years [to recover the reproductive function] and we no longer even expect to succeed. Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought. No wonder we both worship and resent them.

[I]n our hearts few of us believe that the cry of a newborn child will ever be heard again on our planet. Our interest in sex is waning. Romantic and idealized love has taken over from crude carnal satisfaction despite the efforts of the Warden of England [Theo’s cousin, Xan Lippiatt], through the national porn shops, to stimulate our flagging appetites. Our ageing bodies are pummeled, stretched, stroked, caressed, anointed, scented. We are manicured and pedicured, measured and weighed. Golf is now the national game.

It started . . . how? “Pornography and sexual violence on film, on television, in books, in life, had increased and became more explicit but less and less in the West we made love and bred children. It seemed at the time a welcome development in a world grossly polluted by overpopulation. . . . As I remember it, no one suggested that the fertility of the human race was dramatically changing. Overnight, it seemed, the human race had lost its power to breed.”

Fantasy. Fantasy with a purpose, as it happens. The purpose of recovery from an age without purpose—aside from that of breaking par occasionally. We allow the good writer these excesses of imagination. It is all part of the storytelling craft. In latter times Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor have functioned to the same purpose—the grotesqueification (if one may invent a word) of folly and selfishness so that very old impulses and convictions may seem normal and their opposites outrageous.

Ex malo bonum. Alfonso Cuarón leads us to P. D. James’s hearth. At least I think he does. I hope so. We need to be precisely there, in order to examine urgent matters. On arrival, thanks to previous encounters with the author and her terrain, we expect saturnine detectives with aches and desires, stepping over pools of blood. We find instead selfimmolation going on: the twilight of gods all goddedout, national porn shops or no national porn shops or pummellings, stretchings, and strokings. Until the end, that is, when behind fibers of charcoal gray, a faint glow of light may be seen. Cold, beaten down, run over and smeared as though by a freight car, life exhibits . . . life. What was the artist, the original one, trying to do? Something different than her imitator has done. Something far better, I think we might in fairness say.

It was ingenious on P. D. James’s part—she with all those “religious” notions—to see a way of connecting new life and new hope: a novelistic way, with plot and characters. She would chase the point to its logical conclusion. If birth ceased, what would happen? What would the world look like? Modern life obscured these points. A million or so abortions per year might take place in the United States alone, but there were many more births, so you didn’t really notice. Baptisms continued—no cats allowed. A pram could be counted on to contain a baby instead of a doll. No deer (as in the movie) roamed deserted classrooms. But something else went on: a new principle had taken root. It was that, while prams with babies were fine (for those who liked them), there was no societal reason to prefer such to prams in which nonhuman cargoes rode.

The achievement of P. D. James, in The Children of Men, was to take our societal noses—those we were willing to entrust to her—and rub them abruptly in dystopian mud. To their logical conclusion she drew and dragged matters. What if babies no longer came to women who desired them: as distinguished from those who didn’t want them to begin with? What then? What would life be like? It might be dystopically violent in the way suggested by Alfonso Cuarón. Or its main characteristic might be vacancy, emptiness; not just the emptiness of school buildings and obstetrical wards, but of hearts and souls. May not a society perish in a stupor as well as explode in flames, with tires screeching and machine guns chattering?

As we know, there’s more money in explosions than in stupor. Enter Cuarón. And yet, forgive me—I don’t wish to castigate a talented director, least of all a director who sort of sees the stakes in the game. I think we might call the story large enough to warrant multiple approaches—James’s, Cuarón’s, another’s some day. The story framework is James’s. The story is our own. Which is why we need it told to us, in the way mommies and daddies make up stories about their children, for telling to their children. If you think you’ve been told often enough what life means, evidently you haven’t been. You need the artistic pin prick. You need The Children of Men, or something like it.

In a “fragment of autobiography”—her subtitle for the 1999 memoir Time to Be in Earnest, James noted that “the novel was not intended to be a Christian fable but that, in fact, was what I wrote.” No wonder, perhaps, the wonderment. Sales were small by comparison with those for the Dalgleish novels. I recall The Children of Men opening at or near the top of The New York Times fiction bestseller list, teetering there a week or two, then plunging once readers generally learned what it was all about, which wasn’t Adam Dalgliesh (except in some spiritual sense). “But it has produced more correspondence,” she would note, “particularly in theological circles, than any other novel I have written.”

“Particularly in theological circles”? The hint here might seem offkey like Rosie O’Donnell weighing speaking invitations from her Republican fan clubs. In fact, P. D. James comes nearer than practically any living novelist one can think of—certainly nearer than any successful living novelist comes—to the gripping depiction of good and evil, truth and falsehood, sin and repentance, lived in the shadow of the Cross.

Writes Ralph Wood, in First Things: “Absent the love of God, James implies, human love also withers. Absent human love grounded in divine charity, marriages are difficult to sustain. Absent marital and thus parental love, children are orphaned in the ultimate, no less than the immediate, sense. Indeed, orphanhood is the moral and spiritual condition of many of James’ murderers.” In Children of Men, the movie, there is just the sniff of recognition of life itself as the best hope for relief from the world’s traumas. In The Children of Men is the explicit recognition that life is life. And that a higher power controls, directs, orders its ways and means. The new birth that bids to bring a dead world to life again is no “virgin birth.” On the other hand—I will be cryptic, having no wish to spoil things for anyone inspired to pluck the book from a library shelf—an Anglican priest, frozen out by his progressive church but faithful to “the old Bible, the old prayer book,” figures centrally in the narrative of redemption. His name is Luke. But enough of that.

I am not here to take a stand on behalf of The Children of Men as “Greatest Novel of the Twentieth Century”—a work of imperishable grandeur; a must read. It doesn’t come close. Nor could P. D. James have expected that it would. She would have been glad, perhaps, had it sold. You cut a bit of slack all the same for a late 20th century novel, the competition for excellence in that department being so thin. In the whole department of Ideas the competition is thin, the quest for narcissistic pleasure needing no intellectual justification or defense. Just “do it!” Jerry Rubin instructed disciples amid great renown and acclaim, some three decades ago. So some did. Then many more, not asking why. Life, for these, came to seem a possession, usable on one’s own terms, with no sense of purpose and hope as a self-generating commodity.

Roe v. Wade spread the spirit far and near. Did that mournful decision do what the authors intended? Expressly. Was it done well? Even ardent defenders point more proudly to its purpose than to the legal and constitutional technique involved.

Was it worth doing? Give the imagination a jolt or two. Think of baby carriages bearing dolls, and of empty school rooms; think of a world expiring of emptiness. Now and then the imagination can show us more of reality than can the finest, costliest camera lens.

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Published Bio for this issue:

William Murchison, the Human Life Review’s longtime senior editor and 2009 Great Defender of Life, died in Dallas on Oct. 8. Obituary at https://obits.dallasnews.com/ “Children of Men: Read the Book!” was first published in our Spring 2007 issue, one of over 100 articles he wrote for us beginning in 1992.