The Children of Men

The Quietus is the ceremony of mass suicides offered by the government to those who no longer wish to live. It symbolizes the utter loss of hope and the triumph of despair in those who see no point in continuing their lives. The Quietus is ostensibly—at least in terms of public relations—a humane act for those who find their suffering intolerable. However, as its name implies, the ceremony is never as clean as Xan’s government claims. Split into its two syllables, “Quiet” and “us,” the Quietus also connotes the enforcement of a final, definitive silence. And indeed, in reality, the Quietus is also a way to remove those whom the government would rather silence. The Quietus that Theo witnesses, in which he sees that not everyone is a willing volunteer to be sacrificed in this way, is sufficiently ugly and brutal to ally him with the Five Fishes.

Natalie is the infant daughter that Theo and Helena lost when he killed her with his car. She is a symbol of his failed marriage, his empty melancholy and acute guilt, and a reminder that he has never been able to love anyone deeply. In the context of Omega, Theo must also grapple with the fact that he ended a child’s life prior to a time when children would be the earth’s most precious, finite resource. Theo’s acceptance of Julian’s baby is partially the result of his guilt of Natalie’s death.

When Theo sees Xan at the Council meeting, Xan is wearing the “Coronation Ring, the wedding ring of England, the great sapphire surrounded with diamonds and surmounted with a cross of rubies” (108). The ring is an emblem of monarchical power, which Xan wears to show his dictatorial status as Warden. As a symbol, the ring echoes famous rings of power from Wagner’s Ring Cycle or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—artifacts that embody the hunger for and the corrupting influence of power. In the novel, the ring carries an element of almost supernatural mystique: After Theo puts on the ring, he feels a “sudden intoxication of power […] The sense that everything was possible to him, that what he wanted would be done, that what he hated would be abolished, that the world could be fashioned according to his will” (278). Julian, the novel’s moral center, immediately senses that the ring will corrupt Theo, warning him, “That wasn’t made for your finger” (278). Theo is also aware of this danger. When he puts it on, he thinks, “It begins again, with jealousy, with treachery, with murder, with this ring on my finger” (277).