And he went to the boy’s bedside and sat there for an hour, talking to the boy, and picked up his passion-for football, in the actual case. One evening, at a concert, he told a story of when he was the duty judge and he had to make a very quick decision: This boy urgently needed a transfusion.
What made you choose the perspective of a woman? I became fascinated by one particular case involving a Jehovah’s Witness, judged by my friend Alan Ward. But there’s at least one crucial difference. She reminded me in many ways of Henry Perowne in Saturday, another consummate professional who runs up against the limitations of his own world view. They seem to stand on a novelist’s ground. But judges don’t feature so much in literature, though they’re the ones who finally settle fates.
We have a vast number of books devoted to criminals and their victims, to private eyes and policemen. And I thought, This is a completely neglected subgenre of our literature, wide in its historical depth, philosophical, skeptical, sometimes rather witty-and dealing with very key moral issues. Later in the evening, I was able to slip in the corner and look at them. At one point, our host took down from his shelf a volume of his own judgments. I thought to myself, My God, this could be a group of novelists. How did she come into being? Some years ago, I was having dinner with three or four judges, friends, retired and eminent in their field-all men, by the way-and I became very interested in the teasing banter that went on around the table. But, as we discover, she has some blind spots in her own. (An excerpt of the novel was published in our September issue.) Reached by phone at his home in Gloucestershire, I spoke with the Booker Prize–winning author about the inspiration behind his richest female character since _Atonement’_s Briony-and about the real court case that inspired the novel.įiona Maye is a woman of reason and compassion, and her work as a family court judge takes her into the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. Talese / Doubleday), out today, finds the master of literary suspense at his most unexpectedly tender. **Ian McEwan’**s elegant and unputdownably readable thirteenth novel, The Children Act (Nan A. In weighing her decision, she decides to visit the young man in the hospital, leading to a classically McEwan showdown between rationality and faith-and the possibility of art to transcend all. Meanwhile, she’s been tasked with the ruling of her career, on a case involving a critically ill teenage boy, a Jehovah’s Witness, who has refused treatment on religious grounds. Fiona Maye, a distinguished London family court judge, is blindsided when her husband announces his intention to have an affair-and asks for her blessing.
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