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Rapidly Rises the Morning Tide: An Essay on P. D. James's The Children of Men
By Ralph C. Wood

P.D. James is the heir-apparent to Agatha Christie as England's "Queen of Crime." Yet James is a mystery-writer with a difference. In all eleven of her novels, she is concerned with deeper matters than "who done it." Unlike typical writers of thrillers, she fleshes out her characters with complex motives and particular features, and she fills in her settings with wondrous detail. In A Taste for Death (1986), for example, James recreates the urban atmosphere of contemporary London, much as Dickens evoked the odors and fogs of the Victorian city. So are the barren fens of Norfolk and East Anglia powerfully rendered in Devices and Desires (1990). James has come increasingly, in fact, to resemble the great social novelists of nineteenth century England, perhaps George Eliot most especially. Like the eminent Victorian with a

"The key to P. D. James's fiction, especially her later work, is her Christianity. "

masculine pen name, James is concerned to offer a moral critique of society. Abortion, euthanasia, nuclear power, environmental disaster, terrorism, racism-all the vexing issues of our time simmer beneath the surface of James's murder mysteries. Her most recent novel, The Children of Men, is no exception. Yet it engages these troublous questions in a radically new way-as if to warn that we are about to witness a dreadful and wondrous convergence of human evil and divine grace.

Ralph C. Wood is Easley Professor of Religion at Wake Forest University and author of The Comedy of Redemption (1988).

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AN IMPLICIT CHRISTIAN VISION

The key to P. D. James's fiction, especially her later work, is her Christianity. She regards our cultural malaise as having theological no less than ethical cause. The murder in A Taste for Death occurs in a church, for instance, and the murderer is not only a sadist but also a nihilist who revels in the god-like power inherent in the threat of death. He kills in order to prove that the cosmos is empty of divinity. Like Dostoevsky, James is determined to ask whether, if there be no God, all goodness is vacated and all evils unleashed. As a Christian, James knows that the answer is yes. But as a novelist, she has sought to make her faith implicit rather than overt. In interviews following televised versions of her work, James has pointed out that Adam Dalgliesh, her chief detective is a confirmed skeptic. She does not want to confine her hero within her own convictions, nor to impose them on her readers. James is an artist whose moral instruction is conveyed indirectly through aesthetic appeal, not a prophet who seeks our conversion by directly declaring the divine Word.

The artistic indirectness of James's Christian vision is made most evident in Innocent Blood, the novel whose manner and matter most clearly resemble The Children of Men. Strictly speaking, neither novel is a

"James's wrath against… secular smugness is exceeded only by her impatience at the complacency and cowardice of her fellow Christians. "

detective story. There being no crime to solve, James focusses her earlier novel on a much deeper concern: the enormous subtlety of evil. Innocent Blood contains not one protagonist but three, and each of them surprises us in the capacity to do both wicked and generous things. No sooner have we begun to regard the novel's central characters as despicable people than James reveals their own secret pathos-a suffering so deep that, though it does not excuse their sins and crimes, it makes us understand and even pity them.

Though patient with evil, James is impatient with those who deny its moral and spiritual complexity. The profoundest human horrors do not admit of ready resolution-as if, James once declared in an interview, Parliament could pass a law abolishing original sin. Innocent Blood features a sociologist named Maurice Palfrey who believes, in fact, that evil can be purged by governmental measures. Since we are creatures of our environment, he holds, we need only to improve environmental conditions in order to prevent crime and other social problems. It follows that Palfrey regards Christianity-with its stress on ingrained sin and transcendent redemption-as the great deceit.

Palfrey offers a veritable litany of what he considers to be the major Christian offenses: the monstrous notion that there is a God who created

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us in the divine image (when it seems obvious that we have made God in our own likeness), the pathetic injustice of blaming people for inborn sin when they have no choice in the matter, and the laughable contradiction between the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and the sacramental view of sex as being so holy it must be confined to marriage. Most egregious of all is the doctrine of atonement, with its barbaric idea that the Son must "propitiate His Father's desire for vengeance." Had enlightened folks like himself been present at the crucifixion, says Palfrey, they would have intervened to prevent such a grotesque injustice. "But the God of Love was apparently content," Palfrey laments, "to let it happen-indeed, willed it to happen-and to His only son. You can't ask us to believe in a God of Love who behaves less compassionately than would the least of his creatures."

James's wrath against such secular smugness is exceeded only by her impatience at the complacency and cowardice of her fellow Christians. Palfrey makes his assault on Christianity during a television debate with an Anglican bishop. Instead of replying that the sociologist has been appropriately scandalized by the offense of the gospel-by the good news that God transforms the worst human evil into the highest divine redemption-the bishop blinks. He is too benignly disposed, too timid and vacillating about his own Christian faith, to offer an untrammeled affirmation of it. And so James has a confessed murderess denounce the weakling prelate as he deserves: "Poor bishop! He could only win by saying things that he'd be too embarrassed to utter and which neither the BBC nor the viewers-especially the Christians-would in the least wish to hear."

A CHRISTIAN DYSTOPIA

In The Children of Men James tells both pagans and Christians alike what we "least wish to hear." The hour is late, the times are bad, and James herself is nearing retirement. In this latest work, therefore, she lays aside her accustomed indirectness in order to make her concerns explicit. The novel is not, in fact, a realistic detective story at all but a futuristic fantasy-part thriller, part allegory, part cautionary tale. It is set in the Britain of the year 2021. A mysterious global disease has caused the entire human race to lose its fecundity. Not since 1995 has a child been born anywhere on the earth. These sacrosanct last-born are called Omegas, and they are a pampered and petted lot who care for nought but their own comfort. "If from infancy you treat children as gods," we are wisely warned, "they are liable in adulthood to act like devils."

James's novel springs from a drastic donnée, a startling fictional "given" that strains our credulity. It is difficult to believe that the whole globe could suddenly be stricken with infertility, except by means of an explicable disaster such as the Chernobyl fallout. Yet such an "impossible possible" is the very stuff of dystopian fiction. The Children of Men belongs, in fact, to the anti-utopian tradition that runs from Zamiatin's We (1924) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932), to Orwell's 1984 (1949),

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William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954), and Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins (1971). Such dystopias prophesy that all attempts to erect a utopian society-whether through onmicompetent science or totalizing politics are sure to result in far worse evils than they cure. James might be called a Christian dystopian. Like the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, The Children of Men warns that wrath and destruction are already upon us-but only in order to offer a way out, the way of divine deliverance.

Even the pagan protagonist, Theodore Faron, knows that the English disaster is religious before it is scientific or political: "The discovery in July 1994 that even frozen sperm stored for experiment and artificial insemination had lost its potency was a peculiar horror casting over Omega the pall off superstitious awe, of witchcraft, of divine intervention. The old gods reappeared, terrible in their power." The drop in birth rates had seemed, at first, to be a welcome answer to rampant overpopulation. But it soon becomes evident that life without a future-life confined entirely to the present-is a dreadful business. The generation of new life becomes the universal obsession. Yet despite early international cooperation, each of the Western nations is now engaged in its own secret fertility research. Ethnocentric self-interest triumphs over com-

" Like the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, The Children of Men warns that wrath and destruction are already upon us---but only in order to offer a way out, the way of divine deliverance. "

mon need. All the technological expertise is, alas, to no avail. Though virile males are subjected to compulsory semen-testing, their seed will not impregnate the healthy women whose fertility-potential the state also monitors.

Macabre things happen in this craven new world without children. Kittens are christened in their place. New dolls are dressed up and wheeled about in prams; broken ones are buried ceremoniously in consecrated ground. Women experience false pregnancies and pseudobirths. With a mania at once sinister and sad, everyone is desperate to keep alive the idea of birth and babies. It is a faltering cause. Though the health of the elderly has been mightily improved, senility continues to increase. Nor is government-sponsored pornography able to interest the populace in vaginal sex. Instead, the National Health Service now provides "sensual substitutes" for old-fashioned carnality: "Our ageing bodies are pummelled, stretched, stroked, caressed, anointed, scented. We are manicured and pedicured, measured and weighed. Lady Margaret Hall has become the massage centre for Oxford and here every Tuesday afternoon I lie on the couch and look out over the still-tended

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gardens, enjoying my State-provided, carefully-measured hour of sensual pampering."

THE SHADOW FALLS

Thus speaks the novel's central character, Dr. Theodore Faron: fellow of Merton College, historian of Victorian England, divorced solitaire, and self-confessed failure. Faron has decided to endure the encircling gloom with unpanicked Stoic resistance, cultivating his lonely and loveless garden amid the surrounding collapse. "I don't want anyone to look to me," he confesses, "not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything." Faron's exquisite sensibility keeps him afloat the engulfing tedium, which the French have anointed as the ennui universel. "The weapons I fight it with," Faron writes in his diary, "are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature."

Theo Faron would appear to be P. D. James's vehicle for an angry jeremiad against the decline and fall of the modern West, a Spenglerian voice of despair lamenting our moral and spiritual decay. As an urbane and unillusioned academic, Faron is excellently qualified to mark the increasing barbarity of our age. He is an articulate cynic who scorns both the evangelists of loving hope and the prophets of hateful doom. The world will end, he agrees with T. S. Eliot in "The Hollow Men," not with an apocalyptic bang but with an impotent whimper. "Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent," Eliot wrote in 1925, "falls the Shadow."

This same Shadow of physical and spiritual impotence hovers, a century later, over the England described in The Children of Men. For all her resemblance to the great Victorian moralists, P. D. James is closer to T. S. Eliot than to George Eliot. Faron the moralist is not her surrogate and spokesman so much as her nemesis. His articles of faith do not number thirty-nine but only three, as he reduces the noble mortalism of David Hume to a sorry solipsism of his own making. This is all that Theo Faron believes: "That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I sail no longer be." James seems to suggest that Faron's desiccated humanism-amounting to little more than a decent godlessness-has produced England's sickness unto death. He is an instance of the humanist center that, in Yeats's memorable phrase from "The Second Coming," has not held. On the contrary, everything has fallen apart. At a poorly attended service in the Magdalen College chapel at Oxford, Faron finds a deer standing beside the altar, having wandered in from the meadow. The elderly chaplain offers his complaint against the collapse of Christendom into the brutish state of nature: "Christ, why can't they wait? Bloody animals. They'll have it all soon enough."

When the gods go, as Emerson famously said, the half-gods arrive. P. D. James seems convinced of something far worse: When God himself disappears, the demonic emerges. In the Britain of 2021, Yeats's dire prophecy has come frightfully true: "The best lack all conviction, while

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the worst are full of a passionate intensity." Religious anarchy is loosed upon the land. Churches that have not been entirely abandoned are now used for occult rites, animal sacrifices, and Black Masses. The Painted Faces, a new version of the Skinheads, indulge their orgiastic blood lusts. Flagellants parade in Hyde Park, lacerating their bleeding backs. G. K. Chesterton's tart aphorism proves true: People who cease to believe in God do not believe in nothing; they believe in almost anything. A fundamentalist fulminator named Roaring Roger wins a large following with his comminations against British infertility as the vengeance of God. This purveyor of guilt and shame calls the nation to repent of its disobedience by contributing to his own coffers.

Far more successful is a God-huckster from Alabama named Rosie McClure. She thrives as a televangelist because, as Faron cynically puts it, salvation is "a commodity which is always in demand and which costs [her] nothing to supply." The Reverend Ms. McClure preaches a crossless, Christless, evil-denying gospel whose theme tune is the Beatles' song, "All You Need Is Love." Her congregations sing "cheerful choruses"; they also "laugh, cry, [and] fling their arms like demented marionettes." Rosie the gospeller does not proclaim one Lord and one faith and one baptism, but rather one Love. "No one need feel deprived of a love object," she announces. "It needn't be a human being; it can be

"Theo Faron would appear to be P. D. James's vehicle for an angry jeremiad against the decline and fall of the modern West."

an animal-a cat, a dog; it can be a garden; it can be a flower; it can be a tree. The whole natural world is one, linked by love, upheld by love, redeemed by love." To this litany of all-sufficient love, the unbelieving Faron makes his withering response: "One would suppose that Rosie had never seen a cat with a mouse."

James also subjects the conventional churches to devastating critique. Having replaced the old Prayer Book with a plethora of liturgies, the Anglicans have also abandoned their ancient theology of sin and redemption. They now profess "a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with sentimental humanism." Such religious meliorism arouses James's ire even more sharply than does religious fanaticism. Secularized Christianity leaves the masses so spiritually empty that they turn to reactionary politics as a desperate way of controlling the rampant social violence. They have elected a benign dictator, Xan Lyppiatt, to rule over them. It is unclear whether his name signifies something enigmatic and perhaps Oriental, or something once Christian but now void of power and substance. Yet there is no ambiguity about why Xan calls himself the Warden of England: He presides over a country that has become a prison.

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This Britain come of age is an amiable prison, a veritably Dostoevskyan dystopia. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has the Grand Inquisitor come to "correct" the work of Christ by replacing the risk of spiritual liberty with the surety of material prosperity. "Nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society," declares the Grand Inquisitor, "than freedom." The science of the future will discover, he predicts, that there is no crime and thus no sin, "but only hungry men." Hence the Grand Inquisitor's prophecy that "in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Better that you enslave us, but feed us'".

So it is in James's Britain of 2021. The people have surrendered their freedom to a paternalistic government, welcoming despotism in exchange for security. Parliament meets but rarely, chiefly to confirm the decisions made by an autocratic Council of Five who works with the State Security Police to rule the country with a benevolent tyranny. Such a political system "gives the illusion of democracy," Faron perceives, "to people who no longer have the energy to care how or by whom they are governed as long as they get what the Warden has promised: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom."

PROPHESYING A HARD-HEARTED POLITICS

In an interview not long before his death in 1990, Walker Percy was asked what concerned him most about the future of the "God-damned, God-blessed USA," as he liked to call it. His answer serves as an unintended gloss on The Children of Men. Percy confessed to being most afraid "of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom, gradually slide into decay through default and be defeated-not by Communism, demonstrably a bankrupt system-but from within by weariness, and boredom, cynicism, and greed, and-in the end helplessness before its great problems." As Percy reveals in The Thanatos Syndrome, so does James disclose here that a soft-centered spirituality produces a hard-hearted politics.

Carl Inglebach is the Lenin-like member of the Council of Five who serves as the philosopher of this brave new society. He is brazen in his embrace of the nihilist politics that weak souls require in a universe devoid of transcendent norms and ends. Inglebach believes that history which he understands in Marxist fashion as the imposition of human will on the world's chaos-is all there is:

Whatever man has done for good or ill has been done in the knowledge that he has been formed by history, that his life-span is brief, uncertain, insubstantial, but that there will be a future for the nation, for the race, for the tribe. That hope has finally gone except in the minds of fools and fanatics. Man is diminished if be lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast. We see in every country in the world the loss of that hope, the end of science and invention, except for discoveries which may extend life or add to its comfort and pleasure, the end of our care for the physical world and our planet. What does it matter what turds we leave behind as legacies of our brief disruptive tenancy? The mass emigrations, the

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great internal tumults, the religious and tribal wars of the 1990s have given way to a universal anomie which leaves crops unsown and unharvested, animals neglected, starvation, civil war, the grabbing from the weak by the strong.

Already in 1947, C. S. Lewis was arguing, in The Abolition of Man, that humanity's conquest of nature would end, if it were not put to a higher purpose than mere survival, with nature's conquest of humanity. When we care for nothing other than our persistence as a species, we cease to be human. We have regressed to the brute state of nature. We have become what Lewis calls "trousered apes." Yet if everyone were reduced to animality, we would all devour each other. Hence Lewis' dread prophecy that "Human nature will be the last part of 'Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall … henceforth be free to make our species whatever we wish it to be." The power of humanity to recreate itself in whatever image it pleases does not make for liberty, as many postmodernists believe. It reveals the enslaving power, says Lewis, "of some men to make other men what they please."

James demonstrates the gruesome truth of Lewis' argument. In The Children of Men, she describes the abuses to which the few who are strong will put the many who are weak whenever, as Inglebach says, a completely historicized humanity returns to the state of nature. Prominent among the many who are used and abused in James's Britain of the future are the guest workers. They are called Sojourners-not because they are pilgrims making their way through this world to final paradise or perdition, but because they have no permanent status in England. These Sojourners are imported "from less affluent countries to do [the] dirty work, clean the sewers, clear away the rubbish, look after the incontinent, the aged." Paid but a pittance and confined to camps where the men are segregated from the women, the Sojourners are not only denied British citizenship; they are also deported as soon as they have outlived their function. Far from having been abolished in this enlightened new era, slavery has ferociously returned.

The fate of the Sojourners is benign compared to the plight of prisoners. In fear of the random savagery that now ravages the country, the populace has largely abandoned the call of jury duty, having put absolute punitive power into the hands of magistrates. These autocratic judges have the right to sentence criminals, no matter what the charge, to life confinement on the Isle of Man. There, contrary to its ancient name, a monstrous inhumanity reigns. Cut off from all amenities and civilities, these quarantined inmates have regressed to cannibalistic barbarity. The hideous possibility envisioned by Albany in Shakespeare's King Lear has thus become a reality: "Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep."

The novel's most troubling prophecy concerns neither the guest workers nor the prisoners but the elderly. Those who are senile or infirm are subjected to a state-sponsored euthanasia program called the Quietus. The medieval word which once meant to go in peace, to be quit honorably

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of life through noble death, has become a euphemism for extermination. The ageing who no longer "make a contribution to society," as we are wont to say, are drugged into submission and sent out to sea for drowning. The cruelty of their embarkation is disguised with a spurious festivity. A band plays such grotesquely ironic tunes as "Bye, Bye, Blackbird," "Somewhere over the Rainbow," and "Abide with Me." The women wear white robes and clutch posies as if they were brides, some of them lifting their skirts as they sing and sway in addled pirouettes. One doddering lady, perhaps having been medicated too lightly, refuses to go gently into the night of her "good death." She is rewarded for her resistance by being bludgeoned into pulp.

SURPRISING HOPE

There is subtle danger inherent in prophesying, as James does in this novel, that a ghastly future awaits us. Abomination can exercise its own horrible fascination, so that we become fixated on evil, secretly in love with the vileness that we ostensibly hate. If The Children of Men were nothing but an augury of grisly atrocity, it would read like a gripping version of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Yet James's novel is not, in fact, a work of unrelieved dystopian grimness; it is a book of surprising, indeed apocalyptic, hope. James wants to suggest a way out of our cultural and religious cul de sac, to disclose the nature of divine rescue, to reveal the springs of redemption.

Yet James has confessed that she finds it artistically difficult to render goodness real, to make virtue believable. The reason, she says, is that charity and courage occur, most often, in the quiet circumstances of ordinary life: caring for a sick child or spouse, enduring an uncongenial job, refusing to hate one's enemies. Evil, she admits, is readily amenable to fiction. Because it is so much more dramatic, wickedness can be depicted with searing accuracy. The mystery of charity, being so much deeper than the mystery of iniquity, is far harder to depict. All things good are small and fragile. And because it is fallen and impure, goodness can also produce evil.

James is candid about the slippery ethics of those who fight, even unto death, against the outrages that the majority accepts. Her heroine proves to be a woman of loose morals, and the hero a man who kills for the sake of life. At the end, he is tempted to become a new despot. The original company of resisters who call themselves the Five Fishes-perhaps in self-mockery against the mighty Council of Five-is united by their hatred of the civil horrors, but they are divided in every other way. Two of them are Christians, two atheists, and the fifth is of uncertain persuasion-as James hints, perhaps, that believers will have to make common cause with skeptics if dystopia is to be avoided. There is nothing overtly theological, moreover, about the public Appeal that the Five Fishes make to the British people. Their brief list of demands declares simply that, in the name of humanity, the atrocities must be stopped: "We cannot shut our

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eyes any longer to the evils in our society. if our race is to die, let us at least die as free men and women, as human beings, not as devils."

Yet humanity itself is too abstract an ideal, too gaseous a norm, to prompt radical devotion to the good. Something far more specific and concrete and divine is required. Devils emerge when God is denied, and freedom comes through slavery to the One who died to set captives at liberty. The novel's heroine, a Christian woman named Julian, comprehends such hard truths. It is she, therefore, who urges Theodore Faron to combat the public depravity by joining the cause of the Five Fishes. As the cousin and former confidant of Xan Lyppiatt, Theo might bring the Warden to halt the evils that are being committed in the name of good. "The world is changed not by the self-regarding Julian tells Theo, "But by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves."

" When we care for nothing other than our persistence as a species, we cease to be human. "

As we have seen, Faron is no believer. Though he attends an occasional church service, he wants to be left alone in his Stoic sufficiency. Not for him, therefore, Julian's Pauline summons to the foolishness of Christian witness. Theo is content to cultivate his own little Candidean garden amid the comfortable despair that is still possible in a world winding down to zero:

In fifteen years' time [he tells Julian] … 90 per cent of the people living in Britain will be over eighty. There won't be the energy for evil any more than there will be the energy for good. Think what England will be like. The great buildings empty and silent, the roads unrepaired, stretching between the overgrown hedges, the remnants of humanity huddling together for comfort and protection, the running down of services of civilization and then, at the end, the failure of power and light. The hoarded candles will be lit and soon even the last candle will flicker and die.

Among the many mysteries James explores in this novel, perhaps the deepest is the mystery of conversion: How can we be transformed from self-regarding into self-surrendering people? How, more strangely still, can we find the faith to resist overwhelming evil, especially in a world without a future? James's answers are all the more admirable for being theologically modest. Theodore Faron, her hero, is sprung free from his complacency only partially and with great reluctance. He heeds Julian's Macedonian call only because of his own revulsion at the Quietus, especially the clubbing of the helpless old woman. Such cruelty arouses, paradoxically, its own opposition; it prompts Faron to a grudging revolt against evil. Only gradually, and with no drastic about-face, Theo comes to see what is wrong with his solitary and self-protective life, what is right about the life of mutual trust and solidarity.

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Yet Faron is no ready believer. Despite his name, which means God-praiser, Theo has great difficulty embracing Julian's faith. He does not doubt God's existence, he admits, so much as God's goodness. Faron fears that the world is held together not by love but torment-"by pain, the scream in the throat and the scream in the heart." When Theo comes just barely able to believe in God, his faith is prompted by an inexplicable love that he feels for Julian herself. It is not only philia and eros that she evokes in him; it is also agape-a love so unsentimental that Theo is willing to die in order for Julian to live. He becomes a Christian in deed before he can confess his faith in word.

Far from abandoning his lifelong rationalism, Theo remains full of doubt even as he stumbles toward belief, very much like the apostolic Thomas, whom he resembles. He has difficulty crediting, for example, the unprecedented news that Julian has conceived a child. And when he begins to make Christian utterances-"He died to save all of us," he observes of a massacred comrade; "Drink it and be thankful," he tells the thirsting Julian as he gives her water; "Nothing and no one will separate us, not life nor death, not principalities, nor powers," he declares as the enemy closes in on them-Theo seems scarcely aware of what he saying. Ever so slowly and dimly does he discern that these affirmations are utterly, profoundly, theologically true. They come to clear focus in the Prayer Book burial service Theo reads over the corpse of a slain friend. There in Miles Coverdale's rendering of the 90th Psalm, we discover the source of James's title, even as we are also shown the reason for our despair and the hope for our rescue: "Thou turnest man to destruction: again, thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."

THE BEGINNING IN THE END

The Children of Men is most convincing when it hints and gestures at its deep truths. James is least successful when she resorts to direct allegory. My own imagination was strained rather than satisfied, for instance, when the novel's concluding miracle occurs in an abandoned shed that smells of hay and, though sought by a would-be Herod, is found by surprised Magi. The book is ripe with Christian implication without such overt allusion to Bethlehem. The narrative point of view also shifts awkwardly back and forth from the personal diaries of Theodore Faron to the impersonal voice who occupies his consciousness. The ending made me long, alas, for a lengthier book-not so much to know what would happen next as to know why things have happened already. Too many characters are barely sketched, their relations and motives not being limned with the precision and depth that we are accustomed to get from P. D. James.

Such artistic faults notwithstanding, this remains the most provocative novel I have read in many years. It makes liberals question the ready availability of abortion. It makes conservatives ponder our neglect and abuse of the young. It makes heterosexuals ask why they do not want to be burdened with babies. It makes homosexuals ask why they cannot con-

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ceive children at all. The novel requires everyone to measure our loss of eschatological faith. "Eventually the sun will explode or cool," says one of James's characters, professing openly our secret unbelief, "and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble."

Childlessness in the age to come seems to be James's analogue for godlessness in the present age. A futureless and entirely human world ceases not only to be human; it ceases even to be animal, as Theo observes: "we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, for all our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought." To live without eschatological expectancy, to live entirely for empirical existence, to live without hope for the invisible world to come is, as James shows, to live damnably. "We see in every country in the world," declares the atheist Inglebach, "the loss of that hope." We see it also in our own hearts. Spiritual sterility issues in a vast cultural and physical impotence as well.

God may take Christianity away from Europe, said Soren Kierkegaard, as the final way to convince us of its truth. This stark paradox appears to be P. D. James's odd hope. The God who turns humanity to its own self-destruction, who abandons the world to its own tedium and aridity, creates a moral and religious vacuum in order to fill it with faith. God thus

"Among the many mysteries James explores in this novel, perhaps the deepest is the mystery of conversion: How can we be transformed from self-regarding into self-surrendering people?"

calls for the children of men to come again: to return, to repent, to be born anew. Yet James is no Pelagian, despite the old canard that to be British is to be Pelagian by nature. She knows that the God who summons is also the God who provides. The novel ends not moralistically but miraculously, through an act at once human and holy: a child is born, a son is given, and the yoke of an oppressor is broken. The frailest of all things, a baby's cry, results in a radical deliverance.

The novel's final section is entitled Alpha, even as the first was called Omega. Thus has the fallen and finite course of things been reversed. "In my end," says the Eliot of "East Coker…. is my beginning." Theodore Faron's last act, perhaps in surprise even to himself, is also a drastic new start, a return to the God who is both Alpha and Omega: he makes the sign of the cross. Such a finish does not evoke "the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," nor even the sweet sadness of F. H. Lyte's "Abide with Me." The world's evening current may be fast falling toward final entropy, but P. D. James has revealed, with extraordinary imaginative power, that the morning tide of transcendent hope can rapidly rise.