Ian McEwan leaves vulgarity behind in The Children Act

THE short stories and novella that launched Ian McEwan’s career struck the English literary scene like punk struck music and fashion.

The Children Act, by Ian McEwan Picture: Supplied

IT began with tales of cross-dressing, incest, rape, bestiality and sexual torture — an atmosphere of voluptuous menace rendered only more effective by the total want of affect in their telling. The two volumes of short stories (First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets) and novella (The Cement Garden) that launched Ian McEwan’s career during the second half of the 1970s struck the English literary scene like punk struck music and fashion.

His writing did not seek to update the heavy good taste with which the house of English fiction had been furnished since the Victorians. Rather, it sought to blow up the entire balustraded edifice.

Even lower-middle-class breakouts such as author and essayist VS Pritchett were appalled. In 1980, the senior man of letters wrote that McEwan’s ‘‘limitation is that his range of felt experience is confined to his love of his disgusts’’. But McEwan did break free from those limitations. The middle age of his writing life — roughly from The Comfort of Strangers in 1981to Enduring Love in 1997 — consists of works in which the darkling imagination of the younger man is relayed with mature clarity and breadth. If the sleep of reason produces monsters, he was the lucid dreamer of contemporary Eng lit.

Then something happened: another set of limitations began to harden round his work. Class slipped back in, and by the publication of Saturday in 2005 it felt as if he had become the laureate of England’s bourgeoisie.

His new novel confirms that the author who began his writing life as Sid Vicious has drifted closer to Terence Rattigan: The Children Act is The Winslow Boy with a dash of philosophical disquiet.

As always with McEwan, the set-up is swift and engrossing in outline. Fiona Maye, a respected High Court judge in her late 50s whose area is family court matters — children and divorce, mainly — has just been informed by her husband of decades that he wants permission to have an affair with a much younger woman. He’s an academic by day and a jazz aficionado by night who wants to know, before the door closes definitively, what real sexual passion can be.

Maye, a classical pianist in her meagre spare time (this distinction between the exploratory riffing of jazz and the rule-bound discipline of Debussy and Bach is laboured), is appalled by the suggestion. She offers Jack an ultimatum: forget the idea or leave for good. He decides on the latter course. And so we meet her as a just-separated woman, childless not so much by choice as by ambition and drift, alone in a handsomely appointed north London flat with nothing but her upcoming cases for company.

The most significant of these concerns Adam, the almost 18-year-old son of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He is suffering from leukaemia but refuses necessary blood transfusions on religious grounds. The judge suspects the devout parents have hoodwinked their son. She takes the unorthodox step of visiting the boy in hospital, hoping to ascertain his state of mind.

Adam turns out to be a lively, gifted and intelligent boy: firm in his inherited beliefs but also curious about the world. He is a poet of some promise and would-be violinist, and when he plays a piece familiar to the judge she is moved to ask him to play it again. This time she sings along, furnishing the second stanza of a Yeats poem set to the traditional Irish air by Herbert Hughes.

It is a consequential encounter. Childless Maye must decide on the basis of their meeting whether Adam is to be saved by the state or left to die, a small-bore religious martyr. In much of McEwan, a dilemma such as this would be the infernal engine driving the remainder of the narrative. Think of the outsized dobermans that gathered up the multiple concerns of Black Dogs (1992), or the balloon accident that sets Enduring Love in motion.

Not this time. Instead we have extensive descriptions of the daily round of a professional couple of the kind who fly to Rome for Keith Jarrett concerts, get their breakfast pastries from Lambs Conduit Street and take their coffee ‘‘strong, in tall white thin-lipped cups, filtered from high grade Colombian beans, with warmed, not hot, milk’’.

Once this social embroidery would have presaged some shocking disruption of the couple’s elegantly ordered existence; this time, the world McEwan describes is barely grazed by circumstance.

The law (and several nods to Dickens’s Bleak House, that greatest of novels about the English legal profession, insist on the law as a subject in its own right here) might stand as a synecdoche for the rich West, all self-protective rules and no larger care. Of its ancient heart, Maye’s beloved Gray’s Inn, the author writes that it is a

gated community of a historical sort, a fortress of barristers and judges who were also musicians, wine-fanciers, would-be writers, fly fishermen and raconteurs. A nest of gossip and expertise, and a delightful garden still haunted by the reasonable spirit of Francis Bacon.

In other words, a world ripe for besiegement by unreason and misrule. But while McEwan’s tendency to set opposing forces (church and state, East and West, liberalism and totalitarianism, and so on) at each other in the narrative ring is long-established, some essential ruthlessness is missing here. McEwan’s best books have always retained just enough of his original vulgarity to spice their serious and sober investigations. This time all we get is one chilly heart.

There is nothing even half-vulgar about The Children Act. Maye will choose, and she will suffer as a result; the law will be revealed in all its majestic indifference to the true welfare of its charges. As the author lingers instead over the palatial accommodations offered to Eng­lish circuit judges and faithfully relays the polite conversations they hold of an evening over boeuf en croute and glasses of Latour, all I could think of was the impeccably conventional tastes of ‘‘Aunt Edna’’, that imaginary, well-to-do playgoer for whom Rattigan claimed to write. The Children Act could have been penned for Edna too.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The Children Act

By Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, 224pp, $29.99