49 pages • 1-hour read
The Children Act
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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, illness, and death.
Fiona Maye is a High Court judge working in the Family Division. She lives in London’s Gray’s Inn Square with her husband Jack. One night, she lies on the couch, drinking Scotch and contemplating her recent court cases and the state of her marriage. Earlier that evening, Jack told her that he wanted to have an affair because he needed a sex life. Fiona had refused to have sex with him because it wasn’t the time, so he suggested he sleep with someone else instead.
Fiona reflects on the evolution of her marriage and all the work that’s busied her of late. She remembers a case involving a Jewish couple’s divorce and the future of their children. The case reminds her of all the cases she’s tried. While they all have the same human themes, she firmly believes “in the provisions of family law” (5).
Fiona’s mind drifts back to her and Jack’s situation. Even before Jack posed the idea of having an affair, Fiona assumed he was seeing his 28-year-old statistician Melanie. She feels frustrated, remembering their argument and tired by the idea of pursuing a formal separation. She doesn’t understand what’s changed between them, as Jack has always been a good husband. She tells herself not to be self-pitying about the situation.
Fiona recalls another recent case she worked on. Judith and Julian Bernstein were a Jewish couple, and Judith left the Haredi community and enrolled her daughters, Rachel and Nora, at a school that didn’t abide by Haredi traditions. She wanted more education and opportunities for her girls than she’d had or the community allowed. Julian wanted the girls raised in the Haredi tradition and argued they were in danger in Judith’s care. After seriously reviewing the case, Fiona decided that the girls should remain in Judith’s care and in their new schools. After her ruling, her fellow judges praised her. She felt her research, work, and ruling had been careful and fair. She’d ruled in the name of welfare and happiness.
Now, however, Fiona feels that she’s failing. She drinks another Scotch and reflects on her isolated life and all the invitations that she’s declined to focus on work. She doesn’t have children, and her marriage is failing. She can’t help imagining Jack with Melanie, although the very notion of Jack’s proposed affair seems ridiculous to her. She still doesn’t understand why he didn’t just go behind her back and sleep with Melanie instead of asking her.
Jack returns to the sitting room for another drink, interrupting Fiona’s thoughts. The couple reignites their earlier conversation. He argues that he’s not giving up on them, and his affair would aid in his happiness; otherwise, Fiona should agree to sleep with him. Fiona silently realizes how much she’s always loved him and recalls all the things she’s done over the years to show her love. Their situation now feels childish. Fiona argues that Jack should’ve asked her why she hasn’t wanted to have sex instead of pursuing an extramarital sexual relationship. He asks her then, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she glances down the room at her piano and the pictures situated on top of it.
The framed photos trace the couple’s life over the years. One photo reminds her of the case of the conjoined twins, Matthew and Mark. The hospital wanted to separate the twins because Matthew was biologically killing Mark; the separation would kill Matthew but save Mark. Fiona ruled in favor of the separation. Her work was praised, but the case “left [its] mark on her” (30). Sometimes, she still thinks about the twins and wonders if she did the right thing. At the same time, she felt more affected by the case than she liked.
Jack recalls Fiona to the present. She asks if he’s already seeing Melanie; he promises he only had lunch with her once, recently. They continue arguing until Fiona’s clerk Nigel Pauling calls her about a new urgent case involving the Edith Cavell Hospital and a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who has leukemia, Adam Henry; the boy needs a blood transfusion to survive, but his parents are refusing on the basis of religion.
Jack retreats from the room. Fiona decides to go to bed to prepare for the next day’s case. In the hall, she hears Jack dragging his suitcase down and leaving for the night, presumably to join Melanie. She lies in bed, thinking of all the children whose fates she’s been involved in, and falls asleep. In the morning, she wakes early and prepares for court.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The opening chapter of The Children Act introduces the parameters of the narrative world and establishes its central characters, conflicts, stakes, and themes. Written from the third-person, limited-omniscient point of view, the narrative closely follows the protagonist, Fiona Maye, privy to her thoughts, perspectives, and experience. Therefore, it is from Fiona’s vantage point that the novel introduces the themes of Resolving the Intersection of Personal and Professional Life and The Psychological Impact of Judicial Responsibility, two of the novel’s primary themes that are entangled throughout Chapter 1. Fiona is a High Court judge and is embedded in the intricacies of the British legal system. Furthermore, she works in the Family Division; her cases all involve conflicts between family members, parents, and children. Because Fiona’s profession requires her to balance issues of child welfare, morality, and fairness, she develops a habit of putting her work before her own life. Her job consumes her mind and heart, causing psychological strain and upsetting her once-balanced marital relationship. In these ways, Fiona’s work both offers her a sense of purpose and actively creates conflict in her life. In the narrative present, she is trying to reconcile these competing facets of her profession to make sense of her interiority.
The entirety of Chapter 1 takes place within the confines of Fiona’s sitting room, an insular setting that symbolically represents the internal entrapment Fiona feels. The chapter opens with Fiona lying on her chaise lounge, holding a glass of Scotch, and studying the objects in the room around her, which include paintings, tables, vases, rugs, her piano, and framed photographs: “On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea” (3). This imagery captures the conflict Fiona feels between her personal and professional lives. The sitting room decor represents her personal life, while the judgment draft represents her professional life. While she can see the photos and decorations and reach the draft, she tries to ignore both, a behavior that shows how trapped she feels between her competing social spheres.
As the scene continues, Fiona remains on the couch but her mind drifts to various other topics and subjects, shifting primarily between her ongoing conflict with her husband and the recent cases she’s tried. Fiona’s stream of consciousness transports the narrative to other eras, issues, and scenes, but she remains all the while fixed on the couch. Her body language and static positioning continue to suggest that she feels trapped, while her more active mental movements show that she is trying to use logic to make sense of her emotional and marital situations. She is unsuccessfully using her professional strategies, techniques she’s used to applying in court, to attempt to resolve her personal conflicts, highlighting how, at the beginning of the novel, her personal and professional lives are not just separate but in conflict.
Fiona’s preoccupation with her recent cases foreshadows her coming legal conflicts and reiterates the psychological impact of judicial responsibility. Throughout Chapter 1, Fiona recalls the case involving the “divorcing Jewish parents […] disputing their daughters’ education” (5), the case involving Judith, Julian, Rachel, and Nora Bernstein and the girls’ futures outside the Haredi community, and the case of separating the conjoined twins, Matthew and Mark. These cases have “common themes” and “a human sameness” that fascinates Fiona (5). In remembering these cases, Fiona is revealing her emotional and moral investment in the families’ lives—an investment that foreshadows her investment in the forthcoming Adam Henry case.
Furthermore, Fiona’s sustained preoccupation with these cases shows that she can’t entirely disassociate from her work. She remains caught up in the lives and fates of her legal subjects, in part because she is human. This is particularly true of the conjoined twins’ case. Although temporally removed from the case, Fiona feels incapable of reconciling with the personal ramifications of her ruling: “How was she to talk about this? Hardly plausible,” she thinks, “to have told [Jack] that at this stage of a legal career, this one case among so many others, its sadness, its visceral details and loud public interest, could affect her so intimately” (32). This passage shows how one’s professional choices might leach into and affect one’s personal life. Fiona feels that her work is a reflection of her character, and if she is ashamed of her rulings, she feels ashamed of herself and hesitates to share these facets of her experience with others—even her husband.
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