Hooked!

It was one of those weekends of connections – or the power of advertising. While watching Battlestar Galactica’s “fall finale,” SciFi Network aired a clip of a new movie that coming out on 12/25 entitled “Children of Men.”  It was quite a mundane clip where the drama was all in the background.  A TV newscasters on a monitor relaying a story about how the last human born on earth was killed while a camera follows the protagonist from getting a cup of coffee/tea to the street where it is revealed it we were seeing London about 20 years in the future.  The protagonist stops at a waste basket to spike his coffee when suddenly the boredom of the day is dramatically changed.  A bomb explodes from the coffee shop, and the action shifts to scenes that highlight world-wide human infertility, and global wars. Not a very cheery future, but one that made me perk up and take notice.  
 

Then on Saturday, we went to a Chanukah celebration in Dublin (California, that is) at an outdoor shopping center where there was a movie theatre.  As we waited for the festivities to start, I noticed a movie poster for “Children of Men.”  I went over and looked that credits and saw the movie is based on a book by mystery writer, PD James. 
 

Hmmm…
 

Sunday, I’m clicking around the Internets, and then I remembered about the movie.  I go to the film’s website and look at the clips and now I’m really hooked!  So, I suggest to J that we walk to the bookstore so I can buy the book and have a read-a-thon at home.  She agreed and even convinced Maya to give up her beloved TV to come with us.  We browsed, we purchased books, we walked home and dug in. 
 

Well, I’m about 80 pages into “Children of Men” and it’s quite sad.  The main character has a tragic past and his present condition isn’t any better. With world-wide fertility (or lack thereof) as the background, the story has a kind of “Big Government Is Gonna Get You” subplot that’s driving the drama. There’s a “rag-tag” group that’s trying to restore democracy in Britain after it is revealed that the Warden of England is basically a dictator who is using is power to consolidate the population in certain areas of the country, abandon the rest, and kill off the old and infirm. Needless to say, this is not one of those “feel good books of the year,” but it is a rather subtle and compelling read. 
 

–PK