The Children of Men

by P.D. James

Xan threw back his shoulders and gave a gasp of relief like an exhausted swimmer emerging to shake the water from his eyes. For a moment he breathed hard; then he said calmly: “I can wait to see her. I don’t want to frighten her. I’ve come with an ambulance, helicopter, doctors, midwives. I’ve brought everything she needs. This child will be born in comfort and safety. The mother will be treated like the miracle she is; she has to know that. If she trusts you, then you can be the one to tell her. Reassure her, calm her, let her know she has nothing to fear from me.”

Mr. Harod, the banal English bougie manor owner.

Don’t romanticize her. She may be the most important woman in the world but she isn’t the Virgin Mary.

"...e is no Mary." Meta

Theo heard Xan’s bullet hiss harmlessly through the sleeve of his jacket. He knew that in that half-second he couldn’t have seen what afterwards he so clearly remembered: Xan’s face transfigured with joy and triumph; couldn’t have heard his great shout of affirmation, like the shout on the bridge at Woolcombe. But it was with that remembered shout in his ears that he shot Xan through the heart.

My favourite line on the movie: is that the armed conflicts seemed deeply plausible -- even to folks who have seen the film and spent years in conflict areas. And Film Theo isn't a cowboy. Never once does he hold or fire a weapon. In a brutal moment of utter desperation, he hits a man in the face with a car battery; but he does so with the same apologetic, wobbly, courtesy Book Theo held up old people.

It seemed to him that he walked towards Xan’s body like an actor in a slow-motion film, hands buffeting the air, feet high-stepping, hardly seeming to touch the ground; space stretching into infinity so that Xan’s body was a distant goal towards which he made his arduous way held in suspended time.

Hahaha. Hardly. Here is a subtle commentary on the would-be hack Hollywood version of this book (which is a miracle that one hasn't arrived.) The movie we is a strange and grounded. It takes on a much harder view on distopic, quasi-future Britain. It is an immigrant's reworking of what the book lays out -- and all the strident elevating that comes with it. I should point out: I don't think PD James' woke-ness is up to board with Cuarón's. And I don't think Mr. Cuarón's feminism is as nearly on point as PD James'. Cuarón is strident and surefooted in his telling (ie. in a way that re-codes the story as more masculine than it really is), but he brings significantly more depth in his telling to the marginalized communities and marginalized characters. As a personal stance, I feel the book has a more hack-ey grasp on the ways of baring the story out that make its half-winking lines about movie cliches feel flat. Heteronormativity and white, professional class, liberal, miracle families literally save the world in this book. So, there's that... And the book hasn't convinced me that it can see poor people other than as an abstract concept. --back to textual stuff-- Both pull liberally from Hitchcock -- this book has many Psycho-isms; and the film is pure North By Northwest. Generally, I should note, most creative folks avoid direct references and lifts from iconic source texts. They will, as this book does -- and as the movie does, pull in outside texts and works to create a setting of their worlds. I love how this book uses the museums, sculptures and renowned paintings to create its atmosphere of decay. A major character comments on "La Pietà"early on. The film has "Guernica" at a casual, bougie dinner setting which is amazing. A character comments on not saving "La Pietà"; only for the camera to hover, plaintively, over the scene of a mother weeping over her grown son in a skirmish at an internment camp. We were talking about Hitchcock. There was a passage earlier where a car is pushed into a lake -- and we sit with a major character's anxiety as he watches it sink. The murders in this book are sudden and stunning. It isn't direct homage, but the book seems aware of Psycho's effects. Cuarón is famous for his long takes and their building tension; and these, at least in some part, owe something to Rope. What really needs to be said is how the film works on a pure North By Northwest line of incident. It gets its kicks from setting up the tensions, foibles, and limits of the character's flight. And spends a great deal of time barely outpacing the (reinterpreted as modern insurgents) Five Fishes; and navigating the awful detritus of a highly nativist, highly militarized civil establishment. None of it is hack-ey. Cuarón simply isn't a hack Hollywood filmmaker. Full stop. And the film transcends key themes in the novel -- without disparaging it. Lovely. Reading on...

“Christen the baby for me. Please do it now, while we’re alone. It’s what Luke would have wanted. It’s what I want.” “What do you want him called?” “Call him after his father and after you.” “I’ll make you comfortable first.” The towel between her legs was heavily stained. He removed it without revulsion, almost without thought, and, folding another, put it in place. There was very little water left in the bottle, but he hardly needed it. His tears were falling now over the child’s forehead. From some far childhood memory he recalled the rite. The water had to flow, there were words which had to be said. It was with a thumb wet with his own tears and stained with her blood that he made on the child’s forehead the sign of the cross.