Book review

Title: The Children of Men 
Author: P.D James
Genre: Sci- fi 
The book begins with an introduction to the Europe of 2021 where the entire human species has become infertile. The last generation to be born on the planet was in the year 1995, the generation was called the Omegas and they were studied beyond belief but humanities final hope of saving themselves proved fruitless. Instead they resigned to slowly die of as much of the pain of death had been removed. The older people going to the Quietus do commit suicide publicly, some against there own will. After the general information on 2021, Theo discusses his life with the reader and then it reverts back to current day oxford where he meets Julian. He then gets caught up in a small rebellion which ends with the saving of the human race. 

There are several main characters in this book, in order of importance they are: Theo, Julian, Xan, Marian, Luke and Rolf. Most of the characters react as they should under the circumstances except for Theo, he displays a distance from the world around him and only starts to care about life near the end of the book. Some of the characters in the book are stock characters such as Xan who is a stereotypical evil doer who can only see his way or Julian, a person who can do no wrong. Out of all of the characters in the book children of men I would have to say that Xan would be my favorite character as he manages to rally the people of England to his cause and still get away with the horrible acts that occur daily. In the story, Xan is the new leader of England. He runs the country with a council of four members to control the different aspects of the lives of the people. He is the “villain” in this story and becomes a key character near the end of the book.

The book theme I would have say would be sci fi as well as human emotion. In the book the plot shows what would happen when all order dissolves in a society. Some examples of this in the book would be the painted faces who have turned to insanity and the mass suicides also known as the Quietus. This book makes me think about what would happen if the entire human race was about to be destroyed and what I would do in that situation. 

I enjoyed the second part of the book more than the first as the second part of the book is the where the real rising action and climax take place. My favorite part of the book would have to be when Xan dies at the end and Theo claims the ring of the warden of England. I could identify with Theo’s position for the first part of the book as if the human race were in a crisis I would try to distance myself from the problem. I would have to say that I did learn something from reading this book, it would be the reaction to life when you know there is nothing left for the entire human race.

discussion 4

Summarizer
From chapters 13 to the end, Theo manages to become more human throughout the story, he steals a car, gets the car set on fire. He becomes a very strong character in the book and focuses mainly on protecting Julian. Rolf after the battle with the painted faces and finding out that Luke was the father flies into a rage and Rolf then leaves to go see Xan. From there on it is a desperate bid for survival by the remaining three people, Theo, Julian and Marian manage to get another car and supplies and make it to a small area in a remote place. Marian dies near the end, killed by Xan and the first human to be born in 25 years is born.

questions for discussion 3

1. do you think that it was a good idea for Theo to talk to Xan?

Yes i think that talking to Xan was a good idea as Theo and Xan grew up together so there was no danger in talking to him.

2. why do you think that Theo decided to talk to Xan?

he decided to talk to Xan because after the Queites he emotionally moved by the event. 

3. In your opinion, was the Queites a good idea?

The queites itself was a good idea if it was not so public and the people who took part wanted to die.

4. Was the prospect that the SSP were killing the people to much for Theo to grasp?

No he knew they were capeble of killing innocent people, just witnessing it for the first time was to much for him.

5. Do you think that the drivers view on God was justified?

Yes i think that the drivers view was justified because up untill that point God had abandoned them 

6. Is Theo a pirate?

THEO IS A PIRATE

I am the discussion director for this week 

Journal 2

1. What point of view is your story told in? the story was written in both first person and third person as part of the book is Theo’s diary and the rest is real time.

2. Is the point of view effective? I think that the point of view of the story is effective as it shows us a glimpse of the main characters views as well as a traditional story line. The first person shows Theo’s thoughts on society while the third person view gives us the author’s opinion on the novel.

3. What is one of the most important/memorable events that have happened so far? Think about that moment and re-tell it from another point of view. For example, if you were reading We All Fall Down as your Literature Circles novel you may re-write from Will’s fathers Point of View(min. 300 words) so far in the novel I think that the most important part would be the first couple pages of the book where they are describing the death of the last human being to be born on the planet. If I were rewriting this part I would write it on behalf of Theo as he would be able to tell us about his thoughts on the subject of the world no longer cares. Theo would have commented on the fact that not a single person in the world would have cared about the death of the person and that is echoed throughout the book as we see the breaking down of human society. 

Discussion three

Vocabulary for this week 
1. Compulsory: Page 30 chapter 3 “nothing is compulsory at woolcombe only unhappiness “ required by rule 
2. Pretensions: Page 32 chapter 4 “ my mother had artistic pretensions” a false or unsupportable quality
3. Lucrative: page 33 chapter 4 “ my mother’s hobby was not unlucrative” profitable 
4. Triumph: page 34 chapter 4 “I enjoyed these solitary excursions, the risk, the thrill of discovering a treasure, the triumph of returning with my spoils” ultimate success 
5. Averted: page 35 chapter 4 “she would speak with eyes averted” turned away

First Journal Response
1. Describe the setting in the novel – Time, Place and Circumstance. Please use quotations to support your answer. The novel is set in 2021 England which is the first journal entry of Theo  
2. Which characters have you been introduced to so far? What are they like? Is there any conflict between characters? The characters that have been introduced so far are Xan and Theo. There is not any conflict between these characters. Xan is colder then Theo who simply does not take much interest in anything and is more calm about the facts of his life
3. Find a quotation that helps describe each of the characters you have been introduced to.  "Xan hated to be touched and i early recognized and respected his invisible no mans land." (chapter 2, 19)  "i tell myself this but do i believe it when the pleasure comes so rarely?" (chapter 1, 12)

sumary of chapters 1 and 2 for discussion 1

The first two chapters of the book are basically some background information of the setting of the novel. Theo is starting to write in his journal about the events that lead up to the year omega when the last generation of humans are born. We are also introduced to Xan, the warden of England who is Theo’s cousin. We are taken to a place where they were raised together. In these chapters we find out about Xan's inablity to care for anything and Theo's awkwardness to life and its Beauty. 

this weeks literacy cirlce role

i am the summarizer for this weeks literary circle

this weeks literacy cirlce role

i am the summarizer for this weeks literary circle 

about the author

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pdjames/abouttheauthor.html

She was born on augest 13 1920 and has written 20 books. Awards: International Crime Writing Hall of Fame 2008; Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America, 1999; Diamond Dagger from British Crime Writers' Association, 1987

"The weapon should always be appropriate to the murderer," P.D. James has said. "For example, elderly ladies, however murderous, are unlikely in the UK to have access to guns.

review number2

P.D. James' latest novel is set in England in the year 2021 -- a bleak, future world without a future where the last child born on earth 26 years earlier has just died in a pub brawl.

The planet is in the grip of global infertility (a mysterious disease has made every man on earth sterile) and a seeming chronic lethargy: The human race is slowly dying, truly not with a bang, but with a prolonged whine.

Protagonist Theo Faron, an unloving and unlovable Oxford don, decides to record the last years of his and England's history in a diary, an admittedly futile exercise since there will soon be no one left to read it. But the effort is meant to be more catharsis than academic exercise, as Faron attempts to decipher what has gone wrong with the planet and his own sterile soul.


Outside the pages of the diary, Faron's power-obsessed cousin, the Warden of England, heads a dictatorship that delivers comfort and stability to the majority at the expense of justice and freedom for the poor and old. The last, coddled generation, the last of the children of men born 26 years before, rove the countryside in hedonistic, murderous gangs. The elderly -- unvalued by the dying, youth-worshiping human race -- choose death or are forced to choose it in a mass suicide ritual called the Quietus.

Religion is just another television entertainment, warm, fuzzy and devoid of any hint of the cross. Churches, mostly abandoned, are ideal places for secret societies that need to gather where they won't be disturbed.

Faron, who has lived his life largely without feeling, is jolted out of his placid existence by Julian, a young woman and former pupil turned inept revolutionary. Politically unimpressed, Faron nevertheless aids the girl and the small secret society she has joined when the group runs afoul of the Warden's fascist regime.

Though the first half of the book is hampered by an irritatingly smug, detached narrative, more a treatise on the ills of modern society than a well-structured story, the second half picks up in deft, Jamesian style. Julian becomes pregnant, and evil bureaucratic powers are soon in pursuit, eager to gain control of the "miracle" mother and her unborn child. A harrowing chase, coupled with an ambiguous ending, makes for an occasional interesting but ultimately unsatisfactory read.

James, a recognized master of the mystery genre, is on shaky ground with her first science fiction novel. Like most good science fiction, James' world in the year 2010 is solidly rooted in the 1990s -- a mirror image, magnified and distorted, but uncomfortably recognizable. Unlike most good science fiction, James' vision is simply not much fun.

There is nothing subtle or slyly witty to delight, no flashes of insight to ponder. It is a long scold from cover to cover.

More disheartening, especially from a writer with as sure a hand as James, is that there is relatively little story. The characters are cardboard and seem to scurry about more to make a philosophical point than to further the plot. Heavy-handed religious symbolism abounds.

Dressed skillfully but without much conviction in the trappings of science fiction, The Children of Men reads more like a conservative's finger-wagging, tongue-clucking sermon against modern mores than the edifying entertainment that James must surely have intended.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_n30_v29/ai_13827666

review for children of men

 



O Brave New World, That Has No People In't! 
Date: March 28, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final 
Byline: By Walter Wangerin Jr.; 
Lead: 

THE CHILDREN OF MEN By P. D. James. 245 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $22. 
Text: 

ON New Year's Day, 2021, "the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl." He was 25. It has been 25 years since a global disease rendered all human sperm infertile, 25 years, therefore, since any baby has been born to bear the future of humankind. The same day marks the 50th birthday of Theodore Faron, doctor of philosophy. On this day he begins to keep a journal as a "small additional defense against personal accidie." 

With such swift strokes P. D. James establishes the central premise of her new novel, "The Children of Men." There follow two worthy adventures for Miss James, for her protagonist and for the thoughtful reader: 

The first concerns final efforts at saving this race, the people, us. The first adventure exemplifies what has always made Miss James's detective fiction structured and strong: story. But Theodore Faron's real story -- the sequence of events that drives toward a conclusion that must succeed, or else all fails -- is slow to start. Not till Chapter Six does Faron meet the woman, Julian, who will involve him and us in plots. And even then things unfold slowly. Faron is not easily persuaded to crack his self-containment for the sake of others. It's not in his character. (He notes his "terror of taking responsibility for other people's lives or happiness.") Nor is it in the times. ("But those who lived gave way to the almost universal negativism, what the French named ennui universel. ") In fact, the novel's Book One, "Omega," acts much as a setup for the story that does not dominate until Book Two, "Alpha." 

But it doesn't matter. The reader can certainly wait for action since the second adventure of the book -- perhaps the more fascinating one -- is the meditation that its premise encourages. In a recent interview, Miss James said, "I thought, if there was no future, how would we behave?" No future, not because it has been canceled suddenly, as by nuclear war, but because it has been cut off at the source: no babies, no next generation. Those alive are thus granted their fullness of years but their deaths are made dreadfully significant. When they die, all die. Contemplating that, in Book One, is the more terrible adventure. For look what becomes of us when we are the end, the point of it all: 

Love is lavished on the inanimate. "Doll-making was the only section of the toy industry which . . . flourished; it had produced dolls for the whole range of frustrated maternal desire." And when Faron sees one woman dash the doll of another against a stone wall, its "mother" screams "the scream of the tortured, the bereaved, the terrified." 

The last-born men and women, that final generation whom society calls "our Omegas," are strikingly handsome and talented but, as far as others are concerned, cold and incurious. Faron writes, "If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils." 

Fatalism, boredom, crime and religious hysteria increase. The Isle of Man is turned into a penal colony where thieves are dumped to survive or to die murdering one another. 

The people hoard against a time when the state will fail. But, careless of anybody save themselves, they permit a dictator to rule England absolutely, serving his own power rather than their welfare. By his decree the old are herded onto a ship for a seeming mass suicide, a ritual called the Quietus. But these people are in fact not suicides but victims -- drugged and set adrift to drown. And Theodore Faron, trying to save one woman from the Quietus, is beaten senseless by a soldier of the state. 

That, for him, is the crucial event. Pity cracks his solitude. He begins to heed Julian, the woman who believes she holds in herself the potential for a future. Since the dictator of England is Faron's cousin, Julian has begged him to reason with the man before she and her group begin subversive activity. After the Quietus Faron agrees and speaks with his cousin. But the dictator remains immovable, and Faron makes a commitment to others in spite of himself. And so begins the action of the book. 

PLOT, under Miss James's hand, is never merely external action. Always she explores character, the complexities of motive and thought and emotion; and always she wonders about the nature of humankind in general -- this baffling admixture of good and evil, faith and failure, love and a murderous self-sufficiency. In her other novels, the author's attention is upon the plot and these concerns appear only indirectly. But here Miss James makes these contemplations the very business of her book, and her view is Olympian. 

From the premise of this novel, death takes on tremendous dimension. And as Faron grows to love Julian, love is purged of personal return. In the time of endings, choices are reduced to the most basic, for self or for others, and those who choose selflessness choose genuine sacrifice, dying for Julian -- who believes she is pregnant -- and for the sake of the future. 

And birth -- for this must be the real plot, the real rebellion, the real potency and salvation of humankind -- the birth of a single child becomes a thing of ineffable glory. 

If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption. From this, Miss James's book draws -- but not heavily -- a mythic breath. 

And she herself signals the source of its title and perhaps of its hope. During a makeshift funeral for one who sacrificed his life for Julian and the future, Faron reads from an old prayer book this psalm: "Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another. . . . Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/07/home/james-children.html