The Children of Men

Theo’s cousin and childhood playmate Xan Lyppiatt opportunistically rises to power as UK Warden after the onset of Omega, a dictatorial position that echoes the real-life Oliver Cromwell’s 17th century reign as Lord Protector after the execution of King Charles I, and whose policies of obscuring the unpleasant and killing off the opposition are a reference to the government of another famous English dystopian novel—George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Xan’s title, like his position, has two meanings: A warden can be someone who “wards,” or protects; however, a warden is also the overseer of a prison. This duality is reflected in Xan’s responsibility for the horrors of the Isle of Man prison and his authoritarian control over many people in the UK.

The novel’s different factions project onto Xan their ideas of who he is. For the militant Five Fishes, Xan symbolizes tyranny and oppression, fueling their terrorist activities and rebellion. Meanwhile, the much more accepting Theo has trouble seeing Xan, a cousin with whom he used to share summers, as a power-hungry dictator. By contrast, Xan sees himself as a man who loves control and hates boredom: After a privileged upbringing in which he could have anything he wanted, he has never experienced the exhilaration of pursuing incremental--possibly unattainable—goals. As Warden, he does not pursue any ideological agenda, having “no political allegiance, no convictions beyond his conviction that what he wanted he should have and that when he set his hand to something he would succeed” (175); rather, his actions are pragmatically directed at staying in power. He demands a specific type of loyalty from his followers: “essentially masculine: hierarchical, unquestioning, unemotional” (99).

Julian is the novel’s Madonna figure, whose story is an updated take on the biblical mythology surrounding the birth of Jesus. A religious woman convinced that she is acting according to God’s wishes, Julian gives birth to a miraculous child—an event that might be the key to saving the degraded post-Omega world; even the fact that Julian’s partner is not the baby’s father is an echo of the Bible’s description of Mary and Joseph. However, Julian is not idealized, but portrayed as a woman with needs and desires: She has an affair with Luke to get back at Rolf, and she falls in love with Theo, helping Theo see that he is capable of love and of a meaningful life.

Julian makes an interesting comparison to other characters in the novel. Like Xan, she is prone to taking action to stave off boredom: She describes her use of Luke as a petty, self-indulgent, and cruel means of keeping boredom at bay. Unlike Theo, Julian is not self-conscious. She does not measure her actions against how she will be perceived, or how she might be inconvenienced because she believes “The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves” (127).