The Themes of Nativity and Resurrection in P.D. James’ The Children of Men, Part II
This is the second of a two-part Advent Programme. The first part, presented on 2 December, is posted here. Both parts have been combined into a single pdf document which can be downloaded here.
Advent Programme at Christ Church – 2014
The Themes of Nativity and Resurrection in P.D.James’ The Children of Men
Part 2
“Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily:
and sweetly doth she order all things”
II.
O Sapientia. O Wisdom. This is the first of the Advent Antiphons, a series of Scriptural statements and prayers that belong to the heightened expectancy of the Advent Season. Suaviter and fortiter, sweetly and strongly, Wisdom rules and moves through all things. Wisdom is an important feature of the Advent season and often as not it is found in and through the experience of human limitation, not to mention human folly and wickedness. Our Advent preparations focus on such follies and wickednesses depicted in Dame P.D. James’ extraordinary novel, The Children of Men, a dystopian novel which examines the spiritual barrenness of our world and day.
That world is viewed through the eyes of Theodore Faron. In him the gentle skepticism and questioning agnosticism of her detective hero, Adam Dalgleish, emerge as a kind of detached atheism. The poetry of Adam Dalgleish, too, finds its complement in the diary of Theo Faron.
The diary serves as a vehicle for describing himself and his world. “If there is nothing to record, I shall record the nothingness”. The diary is not written for the sake of posterity, for there is no prospect of succeeding generations. It represents instead, as perhaps diaries generally do, the hold of memory in the meaning of human personality. It is part of his identity which must, it seems, vanish with himself. “If and when I reach old age – as most of us can expect to, we have become experts at prolonging life – I shall open one of my tins of hoarded matches and light my small personal bonfire of vanities”.
Dr. Theodore Faron is an academic, an historian of the nineteenth century with “an interest in the Victorian Church, old liturgies, defunct forms of worship”. For him “that age…seems like a world seen through the telescope at once so close and yet infinitely remote, fascinating in its energy, its moral seriousness, its brilliance and squalor”. The past of the nineteenth century is woven into the fabric of the twentieth and lies, like a pall, upon the dead lives of the twenty-first century. And yet the memory holds life, ambiguously and tenaciously. The liturgical memory of Theo Faron becomes the conduit of redemptive grace, but only through the learning of love.