THE CHILDREN OF MEN

Reading this, I realized that the movie version (which I really liked when I saw it in the theater) drew little from the P.D. James book beyond the names of the characters, the situation (in the distant future, humanity can no longer reproduce), and the basic plot (reluctant hero must help a mysteriously pregnant woman while evading the authorities). The book’s protagonist, Theo, is a history professor (in the movie, he is a government worker/ex-activist); the book’s pregnant lady is a dissident named Julian (in the movie, she is Kee, an African refugee; confusingly, Julian still exists in the movie as the non-pregnant character played by Julianne Moore, but she is also Theo’s ex-wife, which she is not in the book); in the book the baby is a boy, while in the movie it’s a girl (interesting corollary: in the book Theo’s dead child is a girl, killed when he accidentally backs over her with a car, while in the movie it’s a boy, killed in a flu epidemic—what does all this gender switching signify?). The movie is grim and action-packed, with undertones of the Holocaust and the war on terror. The book is quieter and more subtle, less a plot-driven narrative than an exploration of what a world without children would really be like on a day-to-day level. The answer: outwardly more pleasant than in the movie, but still basically hopeless, with disturbing delusions (women push baby carriages with dolls in them down the street and have kittens baptized) and an underlying foreboding that the race will die out (a deer breaks into a church, presaging that nature will soon reclaim the empty cities, while the government encourages elderly people to commit suicide because there aren’t enough younger people left to care for them). As in the movie, Theo must shake off his cynicism and complacency and learn to hope for the future, but in the book the emphasis is much more on his relationship with his cousin, who has risen to become the totalitarian ruler of England, and his spiritual awakening through his love for Julian (James called the book a “Christian fable”). I thought the book was more thought-provoking and, in an odd way, spookier than the movie, even if less dramatic (the end is a little unsatisfying). But I was relieved to find that rewatching the movie after finishing the book didn’t give me a V for Vendetta reaction: I still liked the film version as much as I had before (of course, the presence of the gorgeous Clive Owen certainly didn’t hurt). The book and the movie stand as good examples of how you can create two different types of dystopias from the same premise.