A few weeks ago, I reviewed John Grisham’s novel Gray Mountain, which I found to be a relatively weak entry in Grisham’s oeuvre. Not giving up on 2014 legal novels, I recently decided to pick up The Children Act (affiliate link) by Ian McEwan, who is not an attorney, but is widely considered to be a more “literary” writer than the likes of Grisham. Before The Children Act, the only previous McEwan novel that I had read was Atonement (2001), which was adapted into a 2007 film starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy (and if you are a tracking-shot aficionado like me who dreamt for weeks about the tracking shot in the True Detective episode “Who Goes There?”, the film version of Atonement contains a breathtaking tracking shot of the evacuation of Dunkirk that is required viewing). Atonement is a fantastic novel with many well-drawn set pieces, and I was hoping that The Children Act could do for law what Atonement did for false criminal accusations. Unfortunately, it did not live up to those lofty expectations.
The Children Act tells the story of Fiona Maye, a childless, middle-aged British High Court judge in the Family Division. As the novel opens, Fiona’s husband Jack announces to her that he wants to have an affair with a statistician in her twenties, but that he does not want to leave Fiona. Jack explains that he has “become [Fiona’s] brother” and that their marriage had become “cozy and sweet.” He argues that he does not want a divorce, but he wants “one big passionate affair” before he dies. Fiona and Jack’s marriage is clearly more out of sync than the Left Shark from Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime performance.
This marital discord provides the background for the novel, which explores Fiona’s handling of a handful of family law cases. For example, she hears a case involving a separated couple where the husband wants their children to attend a traditional, separated orthodox Jewish school, but the wife wants the children to attend a coeducational Jewish secondary school. Another case involves conjoined twins who — due to the fact of their shared organs — are in the process of killing each other. The hospital moves to sever the twins, which would kill one twin but save the other, but the boys’ parents are devout Catholics who “refused to sanction murder.”
Context Windows In Legal AI And Why Content Still Determines Quality
Legal teams ask a practical question. If large language models are so capable, why does legal AI still depend on curated content, and why does surfacing that content matter so much?
The vast majority of the novel involves a hospital’s attempt to convince Fiona to order an emergency blood transfusion for a cancer patient named Adam Henry, whose parents refuse treatment on accounts of their Jehovah’s Witness background. To make matters more complicated, Adam is only months away from his eighteenth birthday (when he could object to treatment without any judicial recourse) and articulately defends his right to refuse treatment.
Fiona decides that in order to properly adjudicate Adam’s case, she needs to meet with him at his hospital bedside in order to ascertain his understanding of his situation. While there, Fiona is impressed by Adam’s demeanor, and the two bond as he reads her his original poetry and plays music for her (he would fit right in in Brooklyn). But after Fiona leaves the hospital, Adam desires some continuing contact with her, and their relationship veers towards the potentially inappropriate.
Surprisingly (given that McEwan is not an attorney), the legal scenes are the strongest aspect of the book. In particular, the book’s opening chapters are very well-written, as McEwan describes Fiona’s day-to-day life as a judge in meticulous detail. McEwan also gives us a glimpse into Fiona’s mindset in deciding the difficult cases that she is confronted with, and how she justifies her decisions given the existing English case law. I am not a family law attorney and the entirety of my knowledge of English law comes from watching A Fish Called Wanda, but McEwan definitely appears to have done his diligence.
But the book falters when it focuses on Fiona’s personal life. The interactions between Fiona and Adam — particularly towards the end of the book — are reminiscent of the most cringe-worthy aspects of the first half of the latest season of Homeland (anyone who watches that show should know exactly what I am talking about). Adam is an interesting and well-drawn character, but his interactions with Fiona are so limited (the book itself is only 224 pages, barely longer than a novella) that it is difficult to believe that they have any sort of deep connection.
Opus 2 Steps Up Its AI Game With Acquisition Of A Legal Tech Startup
With the addition of Uncover’s technology, the litigation software is delivering rapid innovation.
Moreover, Jack is a one-dimensional cipher, seemingly doing whatever is needed for the plot at any given time. At the beginning of the book, he makes the aforementioned ridiculous request to have an affair, thus indirectly leading Fiona to become emotionally attached to Adam. Then, later in the novel, he returns inexplicably from his affair and wants to make the marriage work, setting up Fiona to look bad in comparison. McEwan never provides any indication of Jack’s thoughts, reasoning or motivations.
Atonement is only about 150 pages longer than The Children Act, but it feels like it contains about 400 more pages of material. There is a good story somewhere in The Children Act, but McEwan does not flesh it out very well. I guess that I will have to continue my odyssey for a great, recent legal novel to review (if you have any suggestions, email me or tweet at me!).
Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.