The Children of Men is a dystopian novel written by British author P. D. James that was published in 1992. The 2006 film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuaron is based on the book.
In both the book and the film the action is set in England, a few decades in the future, where worldwide sterility has been strucking for a quarter of a century. In this dying Great Britain, we follow Theo Faron, drawn into a small group of dissidents trying to protect a woman who has inexplicably become pregnant and whose child is likely to be used for the tyrannic government's own agenda.
And that is basically all the similarities between P.D James' book and Alfonso Cuaron's film. Saying the film is an adaptation of the book would be wrong; Cuaron inspired himself from P.D James' universe, borrowing settings and character names but that is all.
While the first half the film sets us into a realistic very actual disintegrating society with video screens everywhere, terror attacks and a government department called Homeland Security, the second half completely overlook this dystopian theme and become a reflective action movie.
In the book, the theme of the broken down society is omnipresent and we are often reminded about the grotesque desperation through scenes of women pushing dolls in pushchairsor people organising christening ceremonies for newborn pets. Science is seen as the fallen God who has failed to explain and cure the mass infertility and religion is either a consolation or an emptiness for people. The elderly and infirms have become a burden and are pushed to accomplish the Quietus, a mass suicide ceremony. Youngsters from poorer countries are lured into England only to be treated as slaves and sent back to their country when they become too old to work.
P.D James' book is, more than everything else, a pertinent analysis of politics and powers and offers an interesting view on how some tyrants come to power, in particular through the character of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England and Theo's cousin. Exceptionally self-confident, he easily seized the title of Warden in an apathetic society where people have lost all interest in politics and happily gave away full power to one man. Xan is no less than a despot, having reduced the Parliament to a merely consultative role and his five people Council never disagrees with him. His rule is advertised and approved by the mass as the fitting answer to the country's threats. It condones the forced labour of immigrants and encourages mass suicides of the old. "What we guarantee is freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom. The other freedoms are pointless without freedom from fear."
About Xan's personal motives, when asked by Theo, he answers, "At first because I thought I'd enjoy it,[... ] I could never bear to watch someone doing badly what I knew I could do well." And when he finally grew fed up with power, he claimed that no one in the Council was capable enough to replace him.
Going back to the group who hope to oust Xan, Theo warned them, "If you did succeed, what an intoxication of power". The warning hangs about the whole novel and it is a theme the film could have explore deeper. Xan is called Nigel and is a secondary character, appearing in a single scene. He is not the Warden of England but a government minister which limit the whole 'seduction of power' theme.
If Theo is the most faithfully adapted character from the books, he still was toned down in the film. He is less ambiguous and more sympathetic, a former activist who lost his son to an epidemic flu. In the book, he is an Oxford history teacher who accidentally killed his daughter towards whom he felt more jealousy than love.
The ends are also drastically different. Cuaron chose an optimistic ending, where Theo saved the mother and child from the claws of anyone wanting to use them, putting her under the protection of "Human Project", a scientific group dedicated to curing infertility. The film ends on a black screen with the sounds of children playing.
The ending of the book is astutely ambiguous, with Theo putting on the Coronation ring, symbol of the Warden's power, apparently succumbing to the 'seduction of power' he warned against.
As P.D James said, "The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, at the end, the mystery is solved. In The Children of Men, there is no such comforting resolution."
In my opinion, both book and film are great and I think they complement each other pretty well. My favourite moment in the film is the Bexhill detention camp which allows us to see first hand the abuses the refugees endure and that were only mentioned in the books (Isle of Wight). This part is so accurate it is impossible not to draw a parallel with today's world. However, P.D James goes even deeper into that whole decaying hopeless civilization and reading the Children of Men is an eye-opening and maybe also a warning to what our society is turning into.
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