The Children of Men Themes

The world of The Children of Men is one obsessed with the past. Humans have been stricken by mass infertility, and no one has been born on Earth in twenty-five years. As the world faces the absence of a future and an inability to see beyond the present moment, the past has become either a place of refuge or a no-man’s-land, a place which people are reluctant to consider or return to. One of the…

In the dystopic world of The Children of Men, hope—for a future, for contentment, for survival—seems impossible. The “humiliation” of the “ultimate failure” of mass infertility has driven human society to the brink, and new kinds of ennui, cruelty, and cultural malaise have seeped into all aspects of daily life. The journey of the novel is the journey from fatalism and despair toward action spurred by hope. As the text unfolds, even the skeptical…

Though the action of the novel is set in Great Britain, P.D. James imbues the text with hints of the effect of mass infertility on the world as a whole, and mass infertility’s status as a global issue. Despite the fact that the entire planet suffers from infertility, there is a palpable lack of globally united thinking or action. The British government has become, essentially, a dictatorship operating under the guise of democracy, and is…

In the bleak, futureless world of The Children of Men, the desire to use power in order to create form, order, and structure is one that rules, or at the very least tempts, several of James’s characters. The sly, “self-obsessed” Xan Lyppiatt has appointed himself the dictator and Warden of England. His cousin Theo Faron struggles to assert authority over his history students at Oxford. Rolf, the leader of the anarchist group The…