When P. D. James published The Children of Men in 1992, she described a future without a future: a world in which people had stopped reproducing. They simply couldn’t make babies anymore, for reasons unknown but possibly involving a pandemic. The opening line of her novel sets the scene: “Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl.” The second half of the story, including its climactic moments, unfolds in October.
The book’s future is now our present, at least on our calendars. This invites a question: After nearly three decades, how does this modern classic of dystopian literature hold up?
Speculative fiction often ages poorly. Its visions of what’s to come are littered with bad guesses about jet packs and underwater cities. At times, however, novels in the genre have shown astonishing prescience: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) warns about the abuse of biotechnology, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) depicts the menace of a surveillance state, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) anticipates cancel culture. We still read and debate these works with vigor and insight. A related category involves human-extinction tales: futures that haven’t happened but that authors have worried about at least since Mary Shelley, best known for Frankenstein (1818), wrote The Last Man (1826).
Nothing in the background of Phyllis Dorothy James suggests that she would put out such a book. Born in Oxford in 1920, she left school at 16 and spent much of her early career as an administrator at a hospital in London. In 1962, she published Cover Her Face, a crime novel that features Adam Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard detective who is also a poet. This popular character ultimately starred in 14 novels, through The Private Patient in 2008. Along the way, James gained a loyal following and became a fixture on best-seller charts. In 1991, she was made Baroness James of Holland Park, a life peerage that entitled her to a seat in the House of Lords, where she served as a member of the Conservatives and helped pass a law that enabled adopted children to locate their biological parents. By the time she died in 2014, at the age of 94, she ranked in esteem alongside the likes of fellow British murder-mystery authors Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
“The Children of Men,” she wrote, “is totally different from all my other work.” For one thing, it was a commercial misfire. “This is the only one of my novels which has not earned its advance, a depressing and somewhat demeaning thought,” she confessed in Time to Be in Earnest, a 1999 autobiography. By another measure, however, The Children of Men was a smashing success: “It has produced more correspondence and controversy, particularly in theological circles, than any other novel I have written.” (In 2006, it became a movie that has many admirers, but not for its adherence to the source text.)
The title comes from Psalm 90 and the plot centers on Theo Faron, a 50-year-old Oxford scholar who keeps a diary at a time of global male infertility. “We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause,” writes Faron in his journal. “Western science and Western medicine haven’t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure, . . . and I share the universal disillusionment of those whose god has died.”
Meanwhile, Theo’s cousin has become England’s “Warden,” a soft totalitarian who commands security police, oversees a penal colony on the Isle of Man, and enforces a policy of mass euthanasia, known as “the Quietus.” Theo joins a group of political dissidents who at first demand reforms and later seek to protect a woman who, inexplicably, has become pregnant. The Warden sees her unborn child not as a blessed miracle but as a disruptive threat.
James said the idea for The Children of Men came to her after reading about a book in a newspaper. “The book reviewed dealt with the dramatic and so far unexplained fall in the fertility rate of Western man,” she wrote. In the novel, she stresses several factors that were revealing themselves even before the curse of infertility befell humanity: “more liberal attitudes to birth control and abortion, the postponement of pregnancy by professional women pursuing their careers, [and] the wish of families for a higher standard of living.” Lurking behind it all was a doctrine of anti-natalism: “We were polluting the planet with our numbers; if we were breeding less it was to be welcomed.”
If these lines capture the emerging attitudes of the early 1990s, they feel even more apt in the early 2020s. Demographers who track fertility rates — the average number of children each woman will have — say a population’s replacement-level fertility rate is 2.1. In the United States today, the number is 1.7 and dropping. In the United Kingdom, it’s 1.6. It’s even lower in other developed nations: 1.5 in Germany, 1.3 in Italy, and just under 1.0 in South Korea, according to the World Bank. The explanations for these declines today are essentially the same as those James listed three decades ago.
In The Children of Men, James did what dystopian novelists always have done: She picked a worrisome trend and extrapolated. “I began to imagine what the world would be like, and more specifically what England would be like, a quarter of a century after a catastrophic year in which the human race was struck by a universal infertility,” wrote James in her memoir. “For twenty-five years no one would have heard a baby cry or heard a child laugh.” The result is a fascinating social portrait in which young men descend into thuggery, childless women dote over dolls, and everybody turns to government for the provision of comfort. The Warden’s slogan is “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom.” A central claim of The Children of Men seems to be that when children vanish, the power of the state surges.
Critics of The Children of Men have complained that the plot is pokey. They have a point. Although the novel occasionally approaches the momentum of a thriller, sections of it drag. Yet the great dystopias are best remembered for their settings and sociologies: the cruel manufacture of Deltas and Epsilons in Brave New World, the menace of the Two Minutes Hate and Big Brother in 1984, and the paradox of book-burning firemen in Fahrenheit 451. The milieu described by James includes government-run porn shops, the widespread dismantling of playgrounds, the exploitation of foreign workers, and more. One of its most memorable details involves the baptism of kittens, in an act that is both blasphemous and pathetic.
Dystopian novels often conclude in despair, but not this one: “The Children of Men ends on a note of hope,” wrote James. It spoils nothing to say its final moments involve something like a Nativity, as a child with salvific potential enters a hostile world. Like other compelling dystopias, The Children of Men is written from a humane perspective, but unlike most of them, it is also Christian. “The novel was not intended to be a Christian fable but that, in fact, was what I wrote,” said James. She added that composing it was “traumatic” and that she “was glad at the end to return to the less depressing ambience of classical detective fiction.”
For James, The Children of Men and its unnerving portrayal of 2021 marked a one-time digression from the familiar turf of the whodunit. If its alarms continue to trouble us, perhaps that’s because it poses a hard question: What have we done?
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