BOOK: The Children of Men

Written in the not too distant past of the early 1990's, British author P.D. James has crafted a frightening novel set in the not too distant future. The book is frightening, not in a Stephen King-like way, but in a realistic human nature kind that causes the reader to question our own vulnerability.

The Children of Men begins in the year 2021 with the murder of the youngest person alive on the planet, a 25 year old Argentinian. The world of 2021 has not had a human birth since the mid-nineties when, inexplicably, all men became sterile. Since this point the world has slowly crawled into a cycle of hysteria. Borders have been closed, mandatory monthly fertility testing has become law, towns slowly shut down do to lack of citizens as the old die, and an entire generation does not know what a crying baby sounds like.

Theo is a history professor at a local University in Oxford, England, where the story takes place. He is divorced after a painful marriage made more so after the loss of his only child, who was born in one of the last years leading up to the age of infertility. His simple life is thrown for a loop when a small group of dissenters approach him with a proposition that he, for a variety of reasons, is not able to reject.

Even though I had seen the movie, staring Clive Owen and Julian Moore, by the same name back in 2006, I enjoyed the book just as much and I'd recommend both. There is a lot different from the book to the film but I understand why the changes were made and, in the end, I think the cinematic version stayed faithful to the spirit of the novel.

Buzzy