My Review of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act

I’m taking a break from THE HAPPINESS PLOT in order to link to my review, which appeared this past weekend on The Catholic Thing, of Ian McEwan’s new novel, The Children Act.

In James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” Gabriel and Gretta Conroy are in a marriage grown cold. One night after a Christmas party Gabriel seeks to rekindle some of their passion. But Gretta is distracted by a song she had heard at the party, The Lass of Aughrim. When Gabriel presses her for her reasons for being so distracted by this song, Gretta admits that it was a song that used to be sung by a young man, Michael Furey, whom she was “great with” as a girl. Gabriel angrily asks Gretta if she is still in love with this Michael Furey. “He is dead,” Gretta explains. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?” Gabriel, humiliated “by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks,” asks how Michael Furey died.

Gretta answers: “I think he died for me.”

The specter of Joyce’s Michael Furey came to me as I read Ian McEwan’s captivating, elegantly written, and disturbing new novel, The Children Act.

To continue reading the review just follow this link. 

*The image of London above is reproduced courtesy of Mewiki at Wikimedia Commons under the following license.