‘The Children of Men’ is starting to look utopian

The reality of a low fertility society

An audio version of this piece is below the paywall (narrated by me).

The two most influential dystopian novels of the late twentieth century are both concerned with the same scenario: a sudden drop in fertility. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale – set in America in the early 2000s – imagines a world in which all but a small number of women are made infertile by some disaster. P. D. James’ 1996 The Children of Men – set in Britain in 2021 – imagines a world in which all men are made infertile by some other disaster. 

Both were written by women of British descent, both of them mothers, and both novels are preoccupied with Christian themes. Neither novelist could have known at the time of writing that birth rates in the rich world had begun their steady and seemingly inexorable decline. They both deserve credit for realising that it would be low fertility – rather than the feared ‘population bomb’ that had been the source of such anxiety in the 1960s and 1970s – that would come to dominate the politics of the near future. 

But, of the two, James’ vision has proved to be the more prescient, most likely because Atwood was not really thinking of the West when she invented her dystopia, but rather of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9. Although the costumes from the TV adaptation have since become a favourite aesthetic theme among the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ in America, their overwrought warnings against Neo-Puritanism are hard to square with the impiousness of Donald Trump, and indeed an ever-growing proportion of the American population. Perhaps America could yet respond to falling fertility with a theocratic revolution, but thus far it shows no signs of doing so. 

Of course, our own fertility problems are a long way from the scenarios imagined by either Atwood or James. But we are also a long way from replacement fertility. The total fertility rate (TFR) in England and Wales dropped to 1.49 in 2022, the lowest on record, and some of our sub-populations have a TFR to rival South Korea’s. With the world’s lowest national TFR, South Korea is currently on track to produce between 4 and 7 great grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today, constituting a 93-96% reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much. The scenario in The Children of Men is not actually happening, but we’re not that far off. 

And many of the social phenomena that we are now seeing in low fertility cultures and sub-cultures are phenomena that James foresaw almost three decades ago. A detail that anyone who has read the novel will surely remember is the bizarre obsession that many of the people of 2020s Britain develop with their pets. Just as the dogs and cats of childless (or grandchildless) people today are given prams, clothes, and Instagram accounts, James’ characters treat animals – particularly kittens – as baby replacements. 

Some pets are even christened by half-mad Anglican vicars. The church’s rejection of orthodoxy in the face of a fertility disaster is another point on which James got it right. “During the mid-1990s,” the narrator tells us, “the recognised churches, particularly the Church of England, moved away from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism.” Does that sound familiar? 

Like Mary Harrington, James also predicts that sex without the possibility of reproduction has a tendency to lose its attraction. Despite their attempts at adventure and innovation, her characters eventually lose interest in sex of any kind. A bit like our own sex recession.  

Where James gets it wrong, it is only because she ends up describing a course that Britain didn’t take (or hasn’t yet taken) in response to the political and economic problems presented by a drop in fertility. Her imagined future isn’t an implausible one, and there are certainly some similarities with the real Britain of 2021. But, just as Margaret Atwood was really thinking of Iran when she designed her dystopia, I wonder if James was really thinking (perhaps inadvertently) of rich north-east Asian countries like Japan and South Korea – countries that have managed to be low fertility, and yet stave off economic decline far more successfully than their European counterparts (at least so far). 

Anyone who has seen the 2006 film adaptation Children of Men (no ‘The’), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, will remember the aesthetic of third world-ification he employs to portray British decline. In the film, the Britain of 2027 (i.e. a slightly later date than in the novel) is squalid, violent, and struggling to maintain basic infrastructure. The omnipresence of tuktuks in London is used as a visual shorthand for the city’s new third world status: tuktuks are a favourite mode of transport in poor countries, not only because they’re cheaper to manufacture than cars, but also because they don’t rely on infrastructure like sealed roads in order to operate. 

But Cuarón’s vision is quite unlike that of the novel. James imagines a declining Britain that is actually much safer and more comfortable – at least in urban centres – than the Britain of today. The authoritarian government, led by the Warden of England, has decided that its purpose is to guarantee “the good order of Britain,” “ensuring that the race dies with some dignity.” 

Thus a harsh, low-cost criminal justice system relies on a penal colony on the Isle of Man in which the prisoners are left to govern themselves. This is described several times as the Warden’s most popular policy, as it has effectively suppressed crime in the cities.