The Children of Men: Chapter 1  Summary & Analysis

Theodore “Theo” Faron, writing in his diary on Friday, the first of January, 2021, describes the early-morning pub-brawl death of Joseph Ricardo, the last human being to be born on earth. Theo has heard the news on the State Radio Service in Britain while sitting down to begin the “diary of the last half of his life.” Theo sees Ricardo’s death as “a small additional justification” for starting a diary—it is also the first day of a new year, and Theo’s fiftieth birthday.

Theo has no plan to leave his diary behind as a record, believing there could be no possible interest in it. Theo is an Oxford historian who is “divorced, childless, [and] solitary,” and his only “claim to notice” is the fact that he is the cousin of Xan Lyppiatt, the dictator and Warden of England.

“All over the world,” Theo says, different countries are in the process of storing important books, manuscripts, paintings, musical scores, artifacts, and other “testimony for the posterity we can still occasionally convince ourselves may follow us,” or for alien life to encounter if they should ever descend upon earth.

Theo recalls a time two decades ago when the search for the last known birth of a human on earth became a “fierce and acrimonious international contest.” Though the true last human birth, Theo says, could never possibly be recorded accurately, the “winner” was ultimately Joseph Ricardo, born in Buenos Aires on the nineteenth of October, 1995. In the wake of Ricardo’s death, Theo doubts that the world will have the energy to search for and name the new youngest human on earth.

Humanity is “outraged and demoralized,” Theo says, more than anything by its failure to discover the root cause of mass infertility. Western science has been a “god” which has now come up short. In the continued absence of any answers, the world soon resigned itself to accepting that mass infertility was not “a malfunction which would [soon] be corrected.” Year 1995 became universally known as Year Omega, and soon the nations of the world stopped cooperating together toward an answer or a cure because “the prize [of finding it first] was too great.” International espionage became commonplace once again, and tensions between nations swelled.

Now, Theo says, there is much “less anxiety” and absolutely no hope where finding an answer or a cure is concerned. Humanity’s collective interest in sex has dwindled steadily, and national government-sponsored pornography shops have sprung up in an attempt to “stimulate flagging appetites.” British society has become obsessed with leisure and pampering.

When the Year Omega arrived, it shocked and terrified the human race; “even frozen sperm” lost its potency and this, in the human imagination, took on “the pall of superstitio[n], witchcraft, divine intervention.”  When the generation born in 1995 reached sexual maturity and testing still showed that not one of them was fertile, Theo says, suicide increased on a global scale. Xan was already the Warden at that point, and attempted to discourage the spread of the epidemic by “imposing fines on the surviving nearest relations.” The plan worked, and the suicide rate fell, but a universal ennui—a depression or malaise—gripped the planet.

Theo claims that humanity can now “experience nothing but the present moment,” and that the fleeting nature of joy, beauty, and pleasure has become even more sharply defined because of the lack of any real future. Playgrounds have been demolished, schools have been boarded up, and video and audio recordings of children have become a kind of “drug.”

The children born in the year 1995, Theo explains, are now known as Omegas—they are an “exceptionally beautiful” but also “cruel, arrogant, and violent” race apart who have been treated all their lives as “young gods.” The Omegas often band together in gangs known as Painted Faces, who hide out in the countryside and terrorize travelers. Theo recalls having a group of undergraduate Omegas in his classes. They were “disruptive and bored,” unable to see the point in studying human history any longer.