P. D. James’s “The Children of Men”, first published in 1992, captured my attention not in print, but on screen, via the unsettling 2006 film adaptation. That ominous cinematic vision, which I first watched over fifteen years ago, burrowed deep into my mind, fueling a long-standing desire to read the original novel. This year, my opportunity finally arrived: while browsing the stalls of the Valladolid book fair in May, I discovered a copy and knew immediately that the time had come to step into James’s original dystopian world.

In “The Children of Men”, the world has been irrevocably altered by a catastrophic event: for the past twenty-five years, humanity has been unable to reproduce. The story follows Theodore Faron, a detached and cynical Oxford historian living in a disintegrating Britain ruled by a totalitarian Warden. With society crumbling under the weight of hopelessness and despair – where suicide is encouraged and the future is extinct  – Theo is one of many who has given up on resistance. However, his routine is shattered when he is contacted by the Five Fishes, a clandestine group of rebels determined to challenge the oppressive government and seek a new purpose for humanity, even in the absence of a future. As Theo is pulled into their desperate struggle, he is forced to confront his own apathy and the moral vacuum of the world.

What struck me most was how different the novel felt from the film: it wasn’t a thriller, but a sort of intellectual exercise where P. D. James, through her unlikely protagonist, reflects on questions about history, spirituality, and how people might react in the face of human extinction.

James’s stylistic choices created an interesting tension that gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, the book’s greatest strengths lie in its philosophical reflections, which the author depicts through deep internal monologue. On the other hand, this resulted in a formal prose and a slow pace that sometimes gave me the distinct impression that the book was written in the 1800s, making it feel strangely set in the past (quite similar, to be fair, to Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale“).

With this in mind, I definitely recommend the book if you are interested in these sorts of topics, but it would not be my first recommendation if this were your entry point into dystopian worlds. I give it an 8.

– S –