The Children of Men. - book reviews

Christian Century, May 19, 1993 by S. Mark Heim

The Children of Men is a gospel story through the looking glass. The colors of the Christian narrative are split into a new, jumbled and resplendent spectrum. Most simply, it is the gospel in reverse. Members of the final generation in James's world are called "omegas." Unusually beautiful, as their elders think, they are also hard and cool: doomed to an end without an audience. The first half of the novel is titled simply "Omega," the term given to 1995, the year the birthing stopped. But the second half is titled "Alpha," for into the story comes the rumor of a pregnancy. This rumor sets into motion all the Herodian works of the state, eventually sending Theo and the little band on a flight out of Oxford. The journey ends in an abandoned rural shed which he imagines to smell of hay and which may or may not be Bethlehem. The magi are there too.

I summarize James's plot elliptically so as to save prospective readers at least some of its considerable surprises, which each in their own way deepen the biblical resonances. In this telling, a kind of passion must come before any nativity. Luke, the priest, and Julian are the only two Christian believers in the book and each ends by embodying part of the gospel they confess.

Above all, the book throws its readers back upon Christian images and words which, transposed to this unfamiliar context, glisten with new life. To the simple questions "What does it mean to be saved?" and "How could a child be our savior?" the book provides achingly intuitive responses. Hope, meaning, even political power are tied and rooted to this rumored child. The river of humanity narrows to this single thread, special in no way whatsoever except for the falling away of the others. The difference between each prospective birth and advent is not biological but circumstantial. By casting the story of redemption in basic, biological terms James interestingly enough opens up its spiritual dimensions. Species death is not the only impasse humanity can reach.

At the hasty, furtive burial of one of the resisters who gave his life to keep the hope of birth alive, Theo is recruited to say the words that only he, historian that he is, remembers from the old prayer book: "Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another ... Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men." Tom from their familiarity, we hear those words in a new way. From beside the grave this funeral phrase calls out to the replenishing infants arriving in the hospitals, to Noah's descendants after the flood: "Come again, ye children of men."

For the biblical question, "If a person dies, can he/she live again?" James has substituted the query, "If a people die?, can they live again?" As the action of the book makes clear, this is a question not limited to extinction. Can Theo, who does not believe he has ever loved, live? Can those who have lost futures and wandered into illusion live again? The characters in various ways revolve about this theme. Nor can it be accidental that the two figures who believe in a redemption other than the biological may hold the secret of physical renewal.