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Book Review: The Children Of Men

While I vaguely remember watching the movie The Children of Men some time ago, I never read the book so for whatever reason I decided to download it and give it a shot. It is only around 240 pages in paperback form and it took me almost a week to read, a sign that it wasn’t terribly engaging.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it takes places some decades after the last human child was born. Humans all became infertile suddenly (men in the book, women in the movie) and society having no future devolves into a quest to make the final years of humanity as comfortable as possible. The story revolves around a woman who is discovered to be pregnant, the first woman to be pregnant for decades, and the book follows a quest to keep her away from the ruling powers. That is very oversimplified but you get the general gist.

The movie was OK and the book was surprisingly barely mediocre. My Goodreads review:

Honestly it wasn’t a great book. Far too much endless, pointless wandering prose that was interspersed by something actually happening. It is one of the rare examples when a movie adaptation was somewhat better than the book although the book and movie are pretty loosely related. The world described by P.D. James was an interesting concept that received fairly minimal world building, likely as a result of something I have noted before that female authors tend to focus on inner and interpersonal dialogue at the expense of world building.

Probably my favorite part of the book is the way it describes how women slowly go insane without children to raise, seeking substitutes in the form of dolls and celebrating baby showers when a cat has kittens. Written in 1992, James sounds prophetic today with so many women calling their pets “fur babies” and describing themselves as “dog moms”. Otherwise it was a mildly interesting book that I doubt I will ever read again.

That was the most interesting part of the book, written in 1992, and the female author, P.D. James, must have seen the early signs of how being childless drives women crazy. Men without the purpose found in protecting and providing for a family get either slothful or dangerous and women without children to raise simply go nuts. Here we are 30 years later and the crazy childless cat ladies are staring down the barrel of retiring alone with no family and no one to care about them other than their cats and the owner of the local liquor store.

Humans have always had to struggle to overcome their basic biological urges. Marriage exists as a way to channel the male sex drive and the female role in pregnancy and child-care into a relatively stable system. We see what it looks like when people stop marrying in a modern society and we are also seeing what happens when sex is decoupled from marriage and reproduction. Millions upon millions of women who are now barren and will never have families are going mad in real time all around us and they will line up to vote for Cumala, a fellow childless cat lady, in the hopes it will help to fill the void in their lives.

As I said, that was one of the only interesting parts of an otherwise fairly dull book although I did like this quote:

There is plenty of decent dystopian literature out there, give this one a pass unless you are trapped with nothing else to read.

9 Comments

  1. Jeffrey Zoar

    The movie was entertaining enough to be worth 2 hours of your time if you don’t have anything more important to do. And if you can overlook all the poz. But then I’m generally partial to dystopian future movies. My big takeaway from it that stays with me are the tv ads for “Quietus,” the painless suicide pill marketed to the general public. Probably because it seemed so plausible.

  2. Anon

    The movie has the fertile woman be some nonWhite. It is saying the future is in their hands and Whites will die out. Filthy shit, like so much else out there.
    I never bothered with either book or movie; seen enough with trailers about a White man escorting some african and all the implications/statements therein.

  3. saoirse

    What, no mention that the pregnant woman is a negress (of course) being saved by a bunch of shit Brits? ……. at least in the film. I took one glance at the cast and the synopsis and said hell no! The director – a Mexcrement – said that since humanity started in Africa it would only be fitting to have the regeneration of
    the human species begin with an African woman. What utter crap! The “Out Of Africa” theory has been debunked multiple times. I’ll pass (actually piss) on it, thanks.
    In addition to gathering pro-White books, essays and videos, I’m in the process of collecting films and documentaries that have exclusively White casts and themes. Nigs, muds, fags, feminists, super-bitches, shitlibs etc. are not included, except in minor roles. Won’t be long before Whites all disappear completely from the ‘Silver Screen’…….. by design.

    • TakeAHardLook

      Humanity may have begun in Africa but it was of the Tigris & Euphrates type–with brain wattage akin to the Egyptian peoples.

      The rest of Africa–the current negroes–represent a divergent line, a dim-witted offshoot from the main flow of evolution that was destined for greatness.

      All nogs worldwide need to embrace their “Wakanda” ancestry, migrate back to Africa and begin to Make Africa Great Again.

      “We wuz kanggs ‘n’ sheeeeeit!”

    • Alex Lund

      I saw a trailer of “The Lost City” and it looked like fun.
      But then I watched it and had to stop, because of a fat, overweight (and thats a nice way to describe her), very loud negress.
      Just her shrill voice is enough to switch off the sound.
      I think they included her just because of her colour.

    • Mike_C

      No, white (looking) people will not disappear from the screen. They have to see Themselves on screen. Just like They have to insert Themselves into other people’s history, and in a central role, at that. (Built the pyramids my yellow ass. And don’t get me started on “Judeo-Christian”.)

      I read an interesting theory the other day, btw: “The Aryans tried to murder all the Jews because they were jealous of our intelligence and our beauty.” It’s so obvious once someone had the mental clarity to point it out. Why didn’t I think of that?

  4. Jesse

    The world according to garp. And Forest Gump.
    Both far better movies than books.
    Children of men was a ‘one-time’ watch
    Thank you for your thoughts.

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