Ian McEwan’s ‘The Children Act’

Being one of the most successful modern British novelists, Ian McEwan’s interest in the lives of others at the top of their professions is understandable. In Saturday (2005) it was a neurosurgeon, in Solar (2010) a Nobel-prize winning scientist, and in The Children Act (2014) a High Court judge. In each case McEwan explores an individual’s response to the conflicting demands of professional and personal existence. All the more agreeable when, as in The Children Act, lived against a domestic backdrop of Renoir lithographs, chaise longues, Bokhara rugs, Talisker whisky, and “multi-generational holidays in the cheaper sort of castle”.

In his latest novel, Fiona Maye not only has to preside over difficult cases which have been taken to the Family Division but has a marital crisis to deal with as well. At 59, she and her husband Jack are, as McEwan puts it, “in the infancy of old age”. However, Jack has decided that he would like a last fling with Melanie, a 28-year old, so by definition young enough to be his daughter - though the Mayes are childless. Seeking to have his cake and eat it, Jack would like his thirty five years of marriage to continue but Fiona, after some inner turmoil:

He had always been kind, loyal and kind, and kindness, the Family Division daily proved, was the essential human ingredient. She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband?

sends him away and has the locks of their flat in Gray’s Inn Square changed.

Melanie, like Jack is an academic,  - "His only book for the non-academic reader, a pacy life of Julius Caesar, made him briefly almost famous …”. Possibly McEwan does not consider the academic world as part of the front rank of professional life. Michael Beard, his Nobel stemming more from luck than brilliance, is almost a charlatan while in Sweet Tooth (2012) Tony Canning and Thomas Haley, both university lecturers, are less than admirable characters, to put it kindly.

Much of The Children Act is spent describing Fiona’s cases, the arguments on both sides and the judgements she reaches, more than on her own predicament. One particular case, taking up more than half the book, requires a ruling on the case of an almost adult Jehovah’s Witness whose family are resisting a medically necessary transfusion. It leads Fiona to make an exceptional decision to visit Adam, the boy in question, in hospital:

This, Fiona decided as her taxi halted in heavy traffic on Waterloo bridge, was either about a woman on the edge of a crack-up making a sentimental error of professional judgement, or it was about a boy delivered from or into the beliefs of his sect by the intimate intervention of the secular court. She didn’t think it could be both.

The Children Act relates how this visit turns into a liaison which is potentially dangerous to Fiona’s career but brings some symmetry to her marriage. The novel is set in 2012, mostly in the legal quarter of a London described with nods to Dickens and Woolf that even I could recognise. As in other McEwan novels there are digressions, for example an account of Fiona’s performing in front of her peers at a concert – Christmas Revels for the Bar – is probably most appealing to readers familiar with the music she is playing. Earlier her husband describes a geology lecture he has attended where it was conjectured that in a hundred million years all that will remain of the Anthropocene epoch will be just six inches of sediment.

Although McEwan has had personal experience of the Family Division, in writing the book, as the Acknowledgements indicate, he benefited from high level advice from within the legal world. So perhaps unsurprisingly he is not as critical of the Bar as some might have hoped. Indeed anyone aware of its arcane arrangements starting with the process of seeking a pupillage and its arbitrary outcomes may be puzzled by just how sympathetically McEwan regards it, although:

A friend, a stalwart of the Queen’s Bench, steered [Fiona] over to meet a ‘brilliant’ barrister who happened to be his nephew. Watched over by the proud uncle, she asked solicitous questions of a thin young man with a pitiful stammer. … an old girlfriend stole her away to a circle of mutinous young women barristers who told her, though in humorous terms, that they weren’t getting the quality work. It was going to the men.

In September 2014 in an article for the Guardian, Ian McEwan: the law versus religious belief, the author provided some background to the writing of The Children Act and concluded:

… the family division is rooted in the same ground as fiction, where all of life's vital interests lie. With the luxury of withholding judgment, a novel could interpose itself here, reinvent the characters and circumstances, and begin to investigate an encounter between love and belief, between the secular spirit of the law and sincerely held faith.

Earlier he had observed that:

Judgments in the family division tend to genuflect politely before the religious devotion of the parties, before arriving at decisions on non-religious grounds.

But at the end of the novel Fiona reaches a shameful conclusion:

Adam came looking for her and she offered nothing in religion’s place, no protection, even though the Act was clear, her paramount consideration was his welfare. How many pages in how many judgements had she devoted to that term? Welfare, well-being was social. No child is an island. She thought her responsibilities ended at the courtroom walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.

Three trivial points. McEwan announced on Facebook in November 2014 that he was writing the screenplay for a film version of The Children Act to be directed by Richard Eyre – they don’t seem to have told IMDb about it yet. He said:

In the part of the central figure, a 60 year old High Court judge, Richard wants to cast one of the best screen actresses in the world. At this stage, it would be improper to name her. But if she were to take on the part, the act of writing itself would be transformed. A face, a voice, a gesture is already embodied in a vibrant person capable of pouring herself into any shape. The transition would take on new interest and force. Fingers crossed.

Not so difficult to make a guess as to who that might be. Secondly, Cafcass is mentioned twice without explanation, its role probably being obvious. Finally, and revealing my ignorance of upper class life, just how does Fiona’s baby grand piano, presumably with the lid up, accommodate “in country-house style” silver-framed photographs of:

Both sets of parents from wedding day to dotage, his three sisters, her two brothers, their wives and husbands present and past … eleven nephews and nieces, then the thirteen children they in turn had made.

Climbing the éminence grise pole

Jack Straw, born in 1946, became a Labour MP in 1979. In 1997, after 18 years representing Blackburn in NW England as an opposition MP, he became Home Secretary, then successively Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary. He was one of only three MPs, all men, who served throughout the Blair and Brown cabinets but he never reached the very top of Disraeli’s ‘greasy pole’, the Prime Ministership. He returned to the backbenches in 2010.

The initial impression that Jack Straw’s recently published autobiography, Last Man Standing – Memoirs of a Political Survivor, makes is discouraging. Not only is it later on the scene than other reminiscences from New Labour (eg Blair, Mandelson, Darling), but also longer, at well over 500 pages.  The table below may be useful in explaining the organisation and emphasis of the book.  The chapters are broadly chronological in that Straw deals in turn with his occupancy of the Great Offices of State (once-great offices of a once-great state might be more realistic) and the one not-so-great one. However, within both his Home Office and Foreign Office periods, successive chapters deal with major themes. Each chapter has its own chronology but inevitably these overlap, an arrangement which sometimes takes the reader forwards and then back in time, and also leaves occasional references to Straw’s personal and family life out of sequence.

For many readers the first group of chapters (A), which explain how Straw arrived in the corridors of power just 10 years after leaving school and became an MP five years later, will be among the least familiar and most interesting. He gives the impression of having been hard done by at the direct grant school, Brentwood (a town in Essex near London), which he attended as a boarder and anyone would sympathise with the situation which led to his disappointing A level results.

Brentwood not having delivered him to Oxbridge, Straw studied law at Leeds, which probably turned out to be a better base for his rapid rise through student politics and return to London. He acquired a national position of sorts as president of the NUS (National Union of Students, an organisation probably being taken far too seriously at the time). After this his rise seems irresistible in hindsight, but it must have required considerable personal effort. Within a few years he took on a councillorship in inner north London, as now an incubator for aspiring Labour politicians, then deputy chairmanship of the long-departed Inner London Education Authority and also passed his Bar finals with high distinction. 

Anyone who has read Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth, will be struck by the authenticity which Straw provides, no doubt unintentionally, to the author’s account of working life in MI5 in the early 1970s as seen through the eyes of a young woman graduate, Serena Frome.  they quote. (page 83)
In his NUS days, Straw found himself calling on the Education Minister, possibly passing real Serenas on the way in:

Bizarrely the headquarters of the Department of Education, which we occasionally had reason to visit, was on the upper floors of a Mayfair building whose main occupant was the Security Service (MI5). Aside from the careful security at the front entrance, the ministers' doors were always open - including that of the Secretary of State, Ted Short. (page 76)

Unsurprisingly the authorities seem to have sucked their teeth when they had to vet Straw as a SPAD to a cabinet minister. Ironically, MI5 would become one of his responsibilities as Home Secretary 23 years later.

Soon after, aged only 28, he was to be offered the post of political adviser to Barbara Castle at the Department of Social Services, years before the term SPAD (special political adviser) was to acquire its current notoriety.  From this point, the story becomes more familiar to anyone who read the profiles of Straw which appeared during New Labour’s heyday. He inherited Castle’s Blackburn seat and spent 18 years in opposition (B) before joining Blair’s cabinet and surviving until Brown’s departure in 2010 (C, D, E, F). Most of the subjects which he covers are the ones to be expected like Iraq and Iran, the latter comes with a helpful primer. Others may have been forgotten: the Pinochet extradition; or failed to enter public consciousness at all: the 2002 India-Pakistan crisis. He points quite rightly to his successes like the Human Rights Act and the Lawrence Inquiry and accepts his share of responsibility for things that seemed right at the outset if not subsequently, like EU immigration, Iraq, and the Freedom of Information Act.

But what is missing? Quite a bit. For example, there is no mention of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 when Straw was Home Secretary. Anyone seeking Straw’s opinion on big issues like climate change, Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, India’s becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, how China may choose to exercise its global power, the value of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and the continuation of our EU membership (though Straw is clear about the desirability of Turkey joining) is likely to feel disappointed – but, to paraphrase Alistair Campbell, he doesn’t do “world view”. There is little indication as to what he wants to do next, either. His opinions about the current Labour leadership are as anodyne as you would expect from an expert political survivalist, and his assessments of Blair and Brown are distinctly more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, although he is sharp enough about some figures from his past like Denis Healey and John Smith. 

Is Straw an éminence grise, or grey eminence, as he is sometimes described?   Not literally: since his early career he has not been a ‘power behind the scenes’, but on the contrary very clearly on the front bench of politics. Perhaps such a title may become apposite eventually, but he is yet to join the Lords or become the principal of an Oxford college (or both or whatever) and assume the role of occasional honoured adviser, like, say, Lord Heseltine. For now, it’s more appropriate to see Straw through the eyes of the artist Emma Wesley who painted him as Lord Chancellor (below right):

Jack Straw is also a portrait of a man doing his job. Here, however, the subject looks off into the middle distance and the reference to Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More raises questions about the role of Lord Chancellor. I have long been fascinated by the folded piece of paper that More holds in the portrait and, when I was commissioned to paint the present Lord Chancellor, realised it was the perfect symbol of the power such men hold over pieces of paper which translates, of course, into direct power over our lives. This power is represented in the portrait by the lock and the portcullises on the chairbacks.

Lord Chancellors by Hans Holbein (1527) and Emma Wesley (2009)

 
So who should read this book? Anyone who wants an objective overview of the period of Labour government from 1997 to 2010 could do a lot worse than read Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People and The End of the Party. But at the next level of detail, among the personal memoirs, as opposed to diaries like those of Alistair Campbell and Chris Mullin, Last Man Standing is more agreeable to read than Blair’s A Journey or Mandelson’s The Third Man, not least because Straw comes across as more down to earth and approachable. Inevitably, there are the limitations which stem from autobiographical self-selection as opposed to a third party’s more objective choice when given the run of the same archives. Where Straw’s records and papers will finish up – Leeds, perhaps – and whether he will, by then, be a figure seen to merit a serious independent biography, only time will tell.

ADDENDUM 15 NOVEMBER

In a post not long after this one appeared in its original form, I did a 'stocktake' of the first two years of this blog.  One issue which I identified was that of some of the posts being far too long - originally this one was about 4000 words, a lot more than the 500 recommended in a recent article on blogging!  The version above, after substantial pruning is nearly 1300 words - probably still more than enough.
 

Ian McEwan’s ‘Sweet Tooth’

Ian McEwan was, like me, born in the UK in the years just after World War 2, so it’s not so surprising that I was buying his early short stories when published in their racy 1970s covers (left) and have read most of his novels since. On the whole I enjoy his work more than that of the other British writers he is usually associated with: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and the late Christopher Hitchens.  Hitchens, unlike the others was not a novelist, and is the dedicatee of McEwan’s latest book Sweet Tooth.

Sweet Tooth has had plenty of publicity in the form of author interviews and reviews, mostly favourable. The novel is a complex mixture of spy story, love story, state of the nation in the 1970s (Memories of the Heath Administration, as it were) and literary incest. The opening sentences:

My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service. Within 18 months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.

seem to give an accurate description of what is to follow.  The plot has been summarised up to a point in nearly all the reviews and I won't repeat it here.

Sweet Tooth is the code name of the security service mission and the novel is set partly in the Angletonian 'wilderness of mirrors' of the intelligence world and partly in academia, in particular the University of Sussex near Brighton where McEwan studied English Literature in the late 1960s. Sussex’s reputation at that time was much higher than it is credited with being in university league tables now. There is a strong personal element to the novel, for example the view of Oxbridge expressed by Serena’s lover, Tom Haley, a writer and academic at Sussex, is almost exactly that of McEwan in his recent BBC2 interview with Kirsty Wark. Haley’s short story, Lovers, which we read through the eyes of Serena, has more than a passing resemblance to McEwan’s short story, Dead As They Come, from In Between the Sheets (top right). Haley is, one might conclude, in many ways a McEwan might have been.

Serena is a Cambridge maths graduate but also an avid reader, a contrivance which presumably allows her to react intelligently to Haley’s writing without getting bogged down in the formal apparatus of lit crit. The use of terms like aposiopesis would hardly maintain the interest of the majority of McEwan’s readership, who are probably like Serena and only capable of a ‘base level of discourse’, as she puts it. I was intrigued by her background, as I remember a former colleague with an Oxbridge maths degree who had joined and left MI5 about 10 years before Serena. She was a brigadier’s daughter rather than a bishop’s, and had resigned not long after recruitment. What she did there I was never told, but I was left with the impression that it was boring. No doubt the work has since been transformed by IT as in most other organisations. Anyway, most of us have no real idea of what working for MI5 would be like then or now. Which makes former head of MI6 John Scarlett’s review of Sweet Tooth in the Daily Telegraph all the more interesting:

Is the backdrop of national crisis and MI5 stumbling correctly told and authentic? Up to a point. The novel is carefully researched.

He concluded:

Sweet Tooth is a fine and complex novel, the work of a master storyteller. It will absorb readers, of whom there will be very many. They should not go away thinking this is a true picture of the Security Service of 40 years ago. And why should it be? It is a work of fiction, not of history.

One thing he might have had in mind is the existence of the standing D-Notice system introduced in 1971. The existence of careful preparatory research is borne out by the book’s Acknowledgements which include Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (in the US, Defending the Realm) and David Cornwell (better known as John Le Carré) for “irresistible reminiscences”. At which point it might be worth noting the distinction between MI5 and MI6. MI5, the Security Service, as they explain on their website, protects the UK domestically from threats to security, whereas MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, collects foreign intelligence – and in the public’s mind is usually associated with James Bond. So it’s a little surprising when Serena states:

At work the one topic was war in the Middle East. Even the most light-headed of the society girls among the secretaries was drawn into the daily drama. … A wall map went up in our corridor with sticky plastic beads representing the opposing divisions and arrows to show their recent movements.

While McEwan is noted for being assiduous about his research - he spent weeks with surgeons while writing Saturday (2005) - he admitted to Kirsty Wark that he often makes mistakes. This is puzzling as he also told Wark that he hands his publisher a final draft which he expects to have to alter, although at the same time he gave the impression that disruptive suggestions were unwelcome. One can’t help thinking that a fact-checker could have improved Sweet Tooth in draft by removing, for example, the non-existent RAF rank of Flight Commander (page 55, more likely Wing Commander from the context). On the next page we are told that an MI5 colleague had, after Winchester, gone to Harvard where ‘he did a law degree and then another in psychology’. I may be wrong, but doesn’t admission to the Harvard Law School require a first degree? Haley seems to have an unusual academic pedigree too: a degree in English, then an MA in international relations, but the subject of his PhD is The Faerie Queen.

By contrast, at school Serena had been “a freak of nature – a girl who happened to have a talent for mathematics … Obviously, an exam in maths was far less effort than one in English literature” (oh sure) but on arrival at Newnham College, Cambridge she learnt at her first tutorial “what a mediocrity I was in mathematics”. “Gawky boys, unblessed by charm or other human attributes like empathy and generative grammar … leered as I struggled with concepts they took for granted. … I couldn’t succeed because I was like nearly all the rest of humanity – not much good at maths, not at this level”. I know of a girl who was at Oxford about ten years ago and in a similar position after getting good A levels – she transferred successfully from maths to psychology. However Serena “did my best to transfer out to English or French or even anthropology, but no one wanted me. In those days the rules were tightly observed.” But someone I know who went to Oxford in Serena’s day transferred soon after arrival from physics to law - if anything the rules are tighter now than then.

Serena tells us that at MI5 she was responsible for the registry files on Communist Party members in Gloucestershire:

In my first month I opened a file on the headmaster of a grammar school in Stroud who had attended an open meeting of his local branch one Saturday evening in July 1972.

But there was almost certainly only one grammar school in Stroud (rhymes with loud) with a headmaster at that time – oddly enough it was attended by Peter Hennessy, the historian of the modern British state, in the 1960s. Sometimes a devil can lurk in such details. According to Channel 4 News:

… the new novel's truthful parallels ran aground when his real-life publisher was forced to reprint the novel. The original Sweet Tooth had included a Sussex University English professor called Tom Healy - coincidentally the name of a genuine professor of renaissance literature at the university.

Matthew Cain, the Channel 4 News Culture Editor, interviewed McEwan in Leconfield House in Mayfair, one of the buildings used by MI5 in the 1970s and where Serena worked. The map below is taken from the endpapers of Christopher Andrew’s book. The blue stars show the Headquarters buildings used circa 1972. Serena’s recruitment interview took place at the location near Regent Street.

If my tone seems a bit carping, the only excuse I can offer is that McEwan’s attention to realism encourages nitpicking - Sweet Tooth features Martin Amis and other literary personalities of the day as well as numerous real places. Despite his distaste for us techies, “unblessed by charm or other human attributes like empathy” as we are, I always think McEwan is a Chateau Haut-Brion among authors and is to be appreciated, if one gets the chance, whatever the vintage. 2012 looks like a good year for both - fortunately for UK readers the price of Sweet Tooth is determined by Random House and Amazon and not by the weather and the Chinese.

Footnote

In a post last year, British Writers and British Art, I expressed some doubt as to whether in McEwan’s last novel, Solar (2010), one of the characters, Melissa, owner of three dance clothing shops, would have owned a Henry Moore maquette, and I rather sourly concluded that:

… I can’t help thinking that Henry Moore maquettes … are more likely to be found in the handsome houses of successful writers like … McEwan (in London’s … Fitzrovia, …) than in the humbler dwellings of … minor retailers.

At Cambridge Serena has an affair with a history don, Tony Canning, who introduces her to MI5. In his cottage:

… was a bright Mediterranean scene of whitewashed houses and sheets drying on a line. It was a watercolour by Winston Churchill, painted in Marrakech during a break from the Conference in 1943. I never learned how it came into Tony’s possession.

Most of Churchill’s watercolours are at Chartwell, but there is nothing particularly improbable about Canning owning one (although the Conference was at Casablanca and Marrakech was a subsequent holiday).

I was interested to read in an interview with McEwan in the Guardian that the Fitzrovia house which had featured in Saturday has just been “replaced with a flat in Bloomsbury and a house in Gloucestershire”. Gloucestershire (Serena’s CP specialism) is in SW England, a region where writers like to spend at least some of their time – John Le Carré in Cornwall and Jeanette Winterson, also in Gloucestershire, come to mind. By the way, Frome (rhymes with plume) is a town in Somerset in SW England, but on high ground some distance from the area known as the Somerset Levels.