As one begins an Ian McEwan novel – this is his 13th – one feels an immediate pleasure in returning to prose of uncommon clarity, unshowiness and control. I was going to add that it's marvellous to feel you are in a safe pair of hands – only safe is something McEwan has never been. This is the best novel he has written since On Chesil Beach (2007), and a return to form after Solar (2010), the novel about climate change that was somehow blighted by its disagreeable protagonist, and his recent underpowered espionage novel Sweet Tooth (2012).
The Children Act opens with what resemble comprehensive stage directions – Bernard Shaw would have approved. We're in the London home of Fiona Maye, a high court judge on a Sunday evening. Props include an unlit fireplace, a round walnut table, a blue vase and "a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for 50 pounds. Probably a fake." That "probably a fake" is typical McEwan. He leads us in one direction, then points us in another. And what one especially prizes is this ability to turn on his heel, change everything within a sentence or a well-placed word. From the start of this masterly novel, there is a larger sense, as Fiona lies on her chaise longue, that an elegantly established equilibrium is about to be rocked – his other work, if nothing else, makes one sure of it.
There are two reasons for Fiona's instability. Her 30-year marriage is in trouble: her husband has told her he must have an affair before he dies. She finds his honest infidelity an insufferable provocation. At the same time, in her pressurised job as a judge in the family courts, a case has got under her skin. Adam is a beautiful, intelligent, wayward 17-year-old with leukaemia whose parents are Jehovah's Witnesses refusing, on religious grounds, to let him have the blood transfusion needed to save his life. He appears to agree with his parents' position.
Just as in Saturday (2005), where McEwan had learned enough about neuroscience to put on a surgeon's scrubs, here he has studied family law extensively (acknowledgements indicate that much legal advice was sought). It is as though he wanted to discover how he might have fared in another high-powered profession. And while trying lives out for size is what every novelist does, McEwan has prepared almost as if for an exam. One cannot help thinking he could have been an ace family lawyer, with his forensic intelligence and command of moral nuance. He echoes legal language plausibly too, and is deft in his journalistic ability (another missed career?) to weave debate into the narrative (passing references to Syria and the Leveson inquiry situate us in time).
But this is not journalism, and the novel raises questions about how imagination and research coexist. In its most moving chapter, McEwan throws away all his legal notes as Fiona, in an independent move, heads off to visit Adam in a hospital wittily likened to "a modern airport. With altered destinations." The scene is marvellous precisely because it borders on the unbelievable, rises confidently above the ordinary, confounds expectation. When Adam plays his beginner's violin and Fiona sings by his hospital bed, the feeling is of freedom. The warmth of the scene arises partly, one supposes, out of the coldness of Fiona's domestic affairs. And the sad song speaks to everyone. It's a scene that is a triumph of imagination over research.
The portrait of Fiona's marriage is also hugely enjoyable. Not a detail escapes McEwan. Even the way a cup of coffee is steered across a table can be telling: a peace offering. They have no children but take "multi-generational holidays in the cheaper sort of castle". Jack is a 59-year-old bohemian academic who goes barefoot in summer. At one point he is described as having "padded in for an argument" which made me laugh aloud. Fiona sees herself as being "in the infancy of old age". She knows Antony and Cleopatra off by heart, having played Enobarbus as a law student in an amateur production in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and her crisp comments on her rival, a 28-year-old statistician, have something of Cleopatra's dismissive concision ("Dull of tongue, and dwarfish"). Her rival is "a silent young woman with heavy amber beads and a taste for the kind of stilettos that could wreck an old wooden floor". Any potential for more extensive damage needs no further spelling out.
Fiona's unhappy private life serves as a helplessly ironic subtext to her professional decisions. She remarks that there is "no denying the relief at being delivered on to the neutral ground, the treeless heath of other peoples' problems". And it's one of the achievements of the novel that it never confines itself to a single unhappiness, but fans outwards into collective family sorrow. Fiona comes to this conclusion: "Kindness, the Family Division daily proved, was the essential human ingredient." Yet, as McEwan keeps showing, kindness is complicated. He keeps us tensely guessing – everything hingeing on Fiona's decision about the boy. And it will not spoil the plot to say that this is a novel which, above all, considers what it might mean to be saved – and not in the queasy sense in which Jehovah's witnesses have claimed the word.
The Children Act is published by Cape (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.59 with free UK p&p
