A year or two later when I told him I was going to write a novel based on what he had told me, but taking it far away from the actual case, I met him many times during the writing to ask him lots of details about how things work.
He told me of a case that he had presided over, concerning a Jehovah's Witness teenager. "Alan read the book to check the details but it was more than that, really," explains McEwan. Simultaneously, she is grappling with a personal crisis which may be affecting her judgment. The novel centres around High Court judge Fiona Maye, who specialises in the Family Division and must deal with a case involving a 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness boy whose parents are refusing to allow blood transfusions that would save, or at least lengthen, his life. Voted the "most human face of the judiciary" when he retired last year, Ward is warmly acknowledged by McEwan at the end of the book. One of his great friends in London, the former Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal, Sir Alan Ward, inspired The Children Act. They still have a flat in Bloomsbury but, "I am mostly here actually. The move entailed selling the large Fitzrovia home in London that provided the chic setting for his much-lauded 2005 novel, Saturday. The 66-year-old British writer is on the phone from his home in Gloucestershire, where he and his wife, Annalena McAfee, moved a couple of years ago. Well, I hope he is McEwan is one of my longtime literary heroes. I had to doff my cap, touch my forelock." Implacable November weather.' It's one of the great openings and it is the English novel about the law. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. It sets the place, the pace and the tone. After reading so many huge books this year - so many sentences, chapters and pages - it is heaven to open The Children Act, the new novel by Ian McEwan, master of concision, and read that word. "London." What a wonderfully succinct opening sentence. She blows it, McEwan tells Linda Herrick. Ian McEwan’s new novel centres around a family court judge who gets too involved in one of her cases.
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