When I was about seventeen, I read The Children of Men (1992) by P.D. James – or at least, I think I did. I have almost no memory of the plot, apart from its central storyline about the spread of infertility in a futuristic, dystopian future. It’s not unusual. I regularly forget entire storylines and characters within a surprisingly short space of time, especially given my profession, although I rarely forget that I have actually read a particular book.
The strange thing is, though, that twenty years later I still recall quite vividly the cover of the book. There is a forest in the background, and the bottom right corner is torn away to reveal a limp, broken doll whose two, blue eyeballs have, rather unrealistically, fallen onto the pavement beside it. The other thing I remember is that it was a Faber and Faber publication, a brand that was, for me, quickly becoming an indicator of quality. That little ff sign introduced me to Andre Brink, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, and numerous other outstanding contemporary writers during the 1990s.
It was with a sense of dismay, then, that I recently watched the adaptation of The Children of Men (2006), a film that garnered glowing reviews at the time of its release. The film is rather different from the book, but what struck my adult eyes was the clunky Christian symbolism that pervades the storyline. There is no question that Kee is meant to be a Madonna-figure, and she is protected, in turn, by Theo, his name transparently chosen because it means “God.”
As I meditated further on the film, though, something ironic struck me about all this Christian symbolism. It came from the realization that there is a parallel between my own faulty personal memory of reading The Children of Men and the selective cultural memory about Christianity on display in the film.
The scene that epitomizes this phenomenon occurs right before the film’s close, when Kee and Theo escape from a building that is under siege by government troops. Seeing the baby in Kee’s arms, the commanding officer orders the soldiers to cease fire so that she can escape to safety. Kee’s pathway through the lines of soldiers is clearly supposed to be loaded with quasi-religious significance, as soldiers visibly cross themselves when the miracle baby passes them by.
As soon as Kee and Theo have reached safety, however, the soldiers resume their attack on the building, mercilessly slaughtering the refugees inside. It was this obvious disjunction between their supposed reverence for life and their practical embrace of killing, a moral contradiction that the film did not even seem to register, that caught my attention. What had these soldiers gotten from their reading of the Bible? Had they remembered any of Christ’s teachings? Or had they, as I had with James’s own novel, only ever truly caught the surface of that book?
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
English Literature Today 