Also in this first act, we learn that Fiona’s own marriage is in trouble. This is what I mean when I emphasize just how realistic this novel is.īut of course there’s more. This stripped-down presentation of Fiona’s life – a constant scrim of meanness and petty demands and egos trouncing other egos punctuated by human beings striving to be not only good but perfect, faced with horrible choices and threat of unbearable loss and guilt – seems a perfectly accurate rendering of the human condition. Fiona cares deeply about all parties in these cases and takes her responsibility as judge very seriously, but we are also aware that cases like these take place against a constant background static of pettiness and bickering: divorcing couples seeking to wound their former spouses at any cost, children used as pawns, obscene amounts of money spent on lawyers and demanded in alimony. In the first long chapter, we see the cases that cross Fiona’s desk in the course of a day: that of an Orthodox Jewish woman defying her community’s tradition by divorcing her husband and seeking to educate their children in secular schools, parents of conjoined twins seeking permission not to have the twins surgically separated – a procedure that would save one twin’s life at the expense of another – against the advice of doctors trained to save lives at any cost, and a hospital seeking permission to transfuse a seventeen year-old leukemia patient against the wishes of the boy and his parents, all of whom are devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and forbidden from receiving blood transfusions. This may be the most realistic novel I have read in years, with not a note out of place.
With five long chapters resembling dramatic acts, this novel is structured like a Shakespeare play, except that it is neither comedy nor tragedy nor history but fundamentally a work of painstaking, intricate realism. Fiona is highly respected by her colleagues and has served as a judge for many years it is clear from the beginning of the novel that she is deeply committed to her job for all of the right reasons. The title refers to a 1989 British law known as the Children Act (which sounds awkward and wrong to my American ear, which wants to hear ‘ Children’s Act,’ but I digress), which states that the child’s welfare (which British law defines as encompassing interests and well-being) must always be the judge’s first priority in any case impacting the lives of children. Fiona Maye’s job requires her to make shrewd, compassionate, and ethically sound judgments involving the welfare of children.
This novel is a slow, tidy, and compelling third-person-limited study of an aging family court judge.
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