IAN McEWAN’S 13th novel starts with a list. It is a list of clipped, verbless sentences setting a scene. The scene, it soon becomes clear, is a sitting room in a flat in Gray’s Inn, and at the heart of it, sipping scotch on a chaise longue, is a woman whose husband has just told her he wants to have an affair.
The woman is Fiona Maye, a 59-year-old High Court judge. In her work in the family division, she aims to “bring reasonableness to hopeless situations”, but this proves more challenging when her husband, Jack, tells her he desires “one last go” at “ecstasy” before he “drops dead”. Fiona is weighing different concerns: whether the daughters of divorcing Jewish orthodox parents should get the liberal education their mother wants, or the “traditional” education their father thinks they need; whether the Moroccan husband of a British academic will snatch their daughter away from her, and the “unfaithful West”, as she fears. Now she balances these thoughts with ones about her marriage — always loving, but no longer passionate — and the “thickening ankles” and “receding gums” of late middle age.
Fiona’s conversation with Jack is interrupted by a phone call from her clerk. A hospital in Wandsworth wants to give a blood transfusion to the 17-year-old son of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but both son and parents are refusing on grounds of religious belief. Fiona has two days to decide, in effect, whether the boy lives or dies.
What follows is coolly gripping, as Fiona grapples with the legal complexities and push her collapsing private life out of her head. Breaking convention, she decides to visit the boy in hospital. What happens in that meeting is surprising and moving, but not as moving as the judgment she delivers to the court the next day. That turns out, like much of this novel, to be a masterclass in the power of precision and restraint.
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McEwan is always a cool writer, and here the prose reflects the icy logic of a brilliant legal mind. This is all the more shocking because the central character, as in his last novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is a woman, and male novelists tackling female consciousness tend not to make logic the key note. It is no great surprise, then, that Fiona, who is also an accomplished pianist, loves Bach. Her childlessness, says McEwan, in one of a number of musical metaphors that form part of a larger musical theme, has been “a slow-patterned counterpoint played out…over two decades”. Her childlessness is also a “counterpoint” to this case, and to the tangled, but not always convincing, events that follow the judgment she has made.
As ever, McEwan is brilliant on the details that form the backdrop to public and private tragedy: the tyres that “hissed on drenched asphalt”, the “tap of thinned-out raindrops on leaves”. He is brilliant, too, on the nuances of relationships, and the “minuscule shift” that can be conveyed in the setting down of a cup. Very occasionally, there’s a false note. It seems forced to describe an orthodox Jewish father as “reedily tall, like one of the rushes that hid the infant Moses”, and it is hard to believe a crane operator would use a phrase such as “we do so”, even in court. There are times when you can’t help wondering whether the odd slip into pomposity, which you had assumed was echoing Fiona’s legal precision, might, in fact, be McEwan’s.
Fiona’s cool rationality, which she has learnt to extend to her private life, may be one of the reasons it is hard to warm to her, and to feel the full depth of her pain. What you do feel, powerfully, is the terrible responsibility she bears. The real imaginative feat of this novel, as in a number of McEwan’s novels, lies less in individual characters than in an evocation of a professional and intellectual world. He has, in recent years, already tackled climate change science, neuro-logy and MI5. Now he brings the world of family law alive. It is here that you find this novel’s beating heart: in the attempts to bring the “essential human ingredient” of kindness to the countless, faceless children whose parents have made them “bargaining chips” and “counters in a game”.
Ian McEwan is at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 3, at 4pm (cheltenhamfestivals.com)
Cape £16.99/ebook £9.98 pp215