Backlog: The Children of Men, by PD James

This was the first book we read for my ENG 202 class this quarter.

It's almost difficult to look back on it now, it feels like so long ago even though it's only been four weeks? five weeks? (It is currently February 20, even if this entry is dated way back when.) Wow, if my memory is already slipping for The Children of Men I am going to have a hard time backlogging all my books from LAST quarter. Oh well. It'll be fun.

(Last quarter was a literature-based baptism by fire, by the way. This quarter is the same, but for analytic writing.)

Anyway.

PD James' The Children of Men, in my mind, runs to much the same tune as Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which, incidentally, is amazing and is yet another one of those books I believe that everyone should read at some point in their lives). It has that bleakness to it, but with a very different quality. What I think was the most impressive aspect of The Children of Men was the very raw emotional aspect. Even though it was set in a world that, like the scientific romances, is already dated and disproved, the emotional transformations and investments these characters are involved in make the world as PD James has imagined it so very tangible. As a reader I found myself relating, especially to the people I should not have been relating to, and it was glorious.

The Painted Faces were a great example of this. Due to spoilers I will try not to say anything that's too telling, but they were wonderfully complex. Not only did they strike me as a visual feast, the whole idea of them, the tribal setup, the blatant, violent rage, somehow was incredibly relevant. They had the kind of anger that has become madness that can no longer be truly expressed in this world, or at least not without some kind of jailtime involved.

Musings aside, this is an excellent read. I would read it again.

On a side note the movie is also fabulous. It's fabulous for very different reasons, but it's a beautifully made film. The uncut shots - I think the longest sequence is a full fifteen minutes - are absolutely stunning.

Readers be warned: detach yourself from the book before seeing the film. You will have a much more wholesome and much less I-want-to-throw-the-remote-at-the-screen time with this film if you judge them as two entirely separate entities. Difficult to do, I know it well, but in the end I find it's better.

And now, as Eddie Izzard would attribute to the Italians:

Ciao! *speeds away on moped*