Faith on Trial

Although Kavadlo’s central analysis is crucial, just as significant is his title’s explicit connection of subversive novels to the political left: to the blue rather than to the red. Indeed, in the long decades of conservatism’s cultural ascendancy, the subversive novel was exclusively the property of radical progressivism, the canon including such countercultural standards as Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club—works condemning American xenophobia, evangelical totalitarianism, and Western consumerism, respectively. If your impulse is to roll your eyes at the “bravery” of the Ministry of Fiction, you are nevertheless left with questions: What, in our age of increasingly progressive orthodoxies, does subversiveness actually mean? Are we permitted to topple prevailing values even as those values move leftward? Or has the truly subversive novel gone the way of the medieval morality play?

It was with these thoughts in mind that I picked up Ian McEwan’s latest novel. An exploration of a Jehovah’s Witness teenager’s refusal to accept a life-saving blood transfusion, The Children Act seemed exactly the sort of novel likely to be labeled “subversive.” Surely Ian McEwan, an outspoken atheist, would use his plot to create a materialist’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, whereby the heroic secular state—embodied by the novel’s protagonist, High Court judge Fiona Maye—liberates an innocent young man from the prison of his faith. Surely the media would trumpet the author’s courage in taking on religion. A longtime devotee of McEwan’s novels, I approached this latest work with no small measure of apprehension. 

To say that I was wrong—deeply wrong—is a welcome relief. In The Children Act, McEwan has fashioned a narrative of adolescent faith far more compelling, and far more complicated, than mere secularist dogma. For that reason alone, the novel is a tremendous achievement. 

Like much of McEwan’s work, The Children Act benefits from its author’s talent for intricate and unpredictable plotting. Here, he begins not with the legal question that dominates the project—must Adam Henry, three months shy of his 18th birthday, accept the transfusion that will save his life?—but with an examination of Fiona Maye’s domestic circumstances. As the novel opens, Fiona, an eminent figure nearing her 60th birthday, is stunned by her husband’s demand for an open relationship, for “one big passionate affair” before a final settling into their happy but largely sexless marriage. Childless by (reluctant) choice, Fiona finds herself at once “a woman in crisis,” mere steps from the fate of “two close friends her age, long deprived by divorce of their husbands, [who] still hated to enter a crowded room unaccompanied.”

That these early pages read not as a superfluity but as the foundation on which the novel will build its moral purpose is a testament both to McEwan’s skill as a storyteller and the ease with which he interrupts the central narrative with recollections of cases long decided—previous intersections of religion and civil society on which Fiona has cut her teeth. Much like in Saturday (2005), in which McEwan inhabits the professional consciousness of his neurosurgeon protagonist, the details here feel exactly right. As the novel progresses, McEwan’s grasp of (and ability to wring narrative intrigue from) the relevant legal precedents facilitates his fairness to all parties. His seeming determination, echoed in Fiona’s oral judgment, to respect any religion that is “calmly expressed and profoundly held” allows us to see the limitations and prejudices of the legal system as clearly as we see the follies of the faithful. 

To put it another way, even as Fiona began to read her judgment, I wasn’t sure which way she would rule. Yet rule she does, and her decision, which comes midway through the text, sets the sometimes shocking course of the pages that follow. As I moved through the concluding chapters, I found myself remembering Aristotle’s claim that the best work of tragedy is done “when the events come on us by surprise,” but, “at the same time, they follow as cause and effect.” Such is the case here, in the novel’s final pages, when the first signs of marital reconciliation are marred by a disaster that strikes before we begin to suspect it. In retrospect, wasn’t it inevitable? Of course she didn’t; of course he did; how did I not see it coming?

Is The Children Act destructive of contemporary norms? Perhaps, though not for the reasons I first suspected. Notable in McEwan’s middle career has been his attention to what Michael L. Ross has called the “cherished humanistic” virtues of “domestic intimacy [and] fidelity between individual lovers.” Though this attention is most pronounced in Saturday—a retelling in prose of Matthew Arnold’s humanist masterpiece “Dover Beach”—the thread can be found in much of Mc-Ewan’s work: Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Sweet Tooth (2012), and now The Children Act. Consider, for example, the language with which Fiona expresses her conception of the legal principles upon which the state’s treatment of a child must be based: 

To the contemporary ear, there’s something edgy in this formulation, just as there was in McEwan’s assertion in the Guardian, mere days after 9/11, that “love was all [the victims] had to set against the hatred of their murderers.” Certainly the English departments identified by Jesse Kavadlo are unlikely to praise those words—or the way in which Fiona, in the closing pages, clings in her grief to her husband. “Ah, love,” Arnold wrote, “let us be true to one another!” In this age of hookups, “rape culture,” and a souring feminism, what could be more subversive than that?

Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.