The Children of Men is a dystopian novel written by British author PD James that was published in 1992. The 2006 film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón is based on the book.
In both the book and the movie, the action takes place in England, a few decades in the future, where world sterility has been battered for a quarter of a century. In this dying Britain, we follow Theo Faron, drawn in by a small group of dissidents trying to protect a woman who has inexplicably become pregnant and whose child is likely to be used for the tyrannical government’s own agenda.
And those are basically all the similarities between the PD James book and the Alfonso Cuarón film. To say that the movie is an adaptation of the book would be wrong; Cuarón was inspired by the PD James universe, borrowing settings and character names, but that’s about it.
While the first half of the film places us in a very real realistic society in disintegration with video screens everywhere, terrorist attacks, and a government department called Homeland Security, the second half completely glosses over this dystopian theme and becomes in a thoughtful action movie.
In the book, the theme of broken society is omnipresent and we are often reminded of grotesque despair through scenes of women pushing dolls in prams or people organizing christening ceremonies for newborn pets. Science is seen as the fallen God that has failed to explain and cure mass infertility and religion is either a comfort or a void for people. The elderly and infirm have become a burden and are forced to perform the Quietus, a ceremony of mass suicide. Young people from the poorest countries are lured to England only to be treated as slaves and sent back home when they become too old to work.
PD James’s book is, more than anything, a relevant analysis of politics and power and offers an interesting insight into how some tyrants rise to power, particularly through the character of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England and cousin of The O. Exceptionally self-assured, he easily earned the title of Guardian in an apathetic society where people have lost all interest in politics and have happily relinquished all power to one man. Xan is nothing short of a despot, having reduced Parliament to a merely advisory role and his five-person Council never disagrees with him. His government is heralded and approved by the masses as the appropriate response to the country’s threats. He condones the forced labor of immigrants and encourages mass suicides of the elderly. “What we guarantee is freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. The other freedoms are meaningless without freedom from fear.”
On Xan’s personal reasons, when asked by Theo, he replies: “At first because I thought I’d enjoy it,[… ] I could never bear to see someone doing wrong what I knew they could do right.” And when he finally had enough of power, he claimed that no one on the Council was capable enough to replace him.
Turning back to the group hoping to drive Xan out, Theo warned them, “If they were successful, what a power poisoning.” The warning looms large throughout the novel, and it’s a theme the film could have explored further. Xan’s name is Nigel and he is a minor character who appears in only one scene. He is not the Warden of England but a government minister limiting the whole ‘seduction of power’ issue.
If Theo is the most faithfully adapted character from the books, he was still toned down in the movie. He is less ambiguous and more understanding, a former activist who lost his son to a flu epidemic. In the book, he is an Oxford history professor who accidentally killed his daughter for whom he felt more jealous than love.
The extremes are also drastically different. Cuarón chose an upbeat ending, where Theo saved the mother and child from the clutches of anyone who wanted to use them, placing her under the protection of “Proyecto Humano”, a scientific group dedicated to curing infertility. The movie ends on a black screen with sounds of children playing.
The ending of the book is cunningly ambiguous, with Theo donning the Coronation ring, symbol of the Guardian’s power, seemingly succumbing to the ‘seduction of power’ he warned against.
As PD James said: “The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, in the end, the mystery is solved. In The Children of Men, there is no such comforting resolution.”
In my opinion, both the book and the movie are great and I think they complement each other quite well. My favorite moment in the film is the Bexhill detention camp, which allows us to see first hand the abuses suffered by refugees that are only mentioned in books (Isle of Wight). This part is so precise that it is impossible not to draw a parallel with the world today. However, PD James delves further into all that hopelessly decadent civilization and reading Children of Men is an eye opener and perhaps also a warning of what our society is becoming.