Try to answer these questions in a text:

1)      Find in the novel the point where Fiona decide to break the professional rule

2)      Why Adam is so shocked by her?

3)      Why did Fiona kiss him?

“She would have liked to see this boy for herself, remove herself from a domestic morass, as well as from the courtroom […] She dismissed the idea as she turned from the window to go back to her couch.” (The Children Act, pages 35-36)

“Given the unique circumstances of this case, I’ve decided that I would like to hear from Adam Henry himself. […] also, he should know that he is not in the hand of an impersonal bureaucracy. I shall explain to him that I am the one who will be making the decision in his best interests.” (The Children Act, page 85)

Fiona decides to break professional rules because she wants to be a human; she does not want to be a law’s instrument, but only a woman.

You cannot clearly understand if her love for Adam is a sort of rebellion to answer to her husband’s betrayal.

When she think about the reasons why her relationship is at the end, she doesn’t find answers inside her conjugal sphere because she build up alibis starting from her work and the stress that it implies.

Fiona wants to stop being an object; she wants to be a lover and start to live. She is sick to decide, to organize life according to decisions. She would life in a thoughtlessly way.

Fiona, going on reading, lose her challenge. She know that her relationship with Adam is wrong. The kiss the focus of existential dilemma she lives.

She is unable to stay with other people because of her work. She knows human being’s brutality and she wants to drive away from everything.

When the reader analyses page 35 he/she knows that Fiona’s afterthought is insubstantial. Or rather, the reader understands that in a way or in another, Fiona is involved into the case. At page 85 the judge outright states her willing: she will visit the boy in “his best interests”. In reality, the visit is in Fiona’s interests, because she is resolute to understand Adam’s strength and brave.

Fiona save the boy from depth, she gives him new strength. Adam touched by Fiona’s action falls in love with her. She returns love, but she surrenders herself and to her professional life. Fiona prefers to reconcile with her husband, rather than risk an awkward relationship with Adam. Fiona’s defeat brings with it also Adam’s surrender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make a comparison with the opening of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

 

LONDON. TRINITY TERM one week old. Implacable June weather.

 

Ian McEwan’s opening clearly refers to Charles Dickens’ one. The spatial content in which the reader put the two openings is the same: London. The language code is the juridical one in both the cases. The shortness and concision of the sentences compel the reader to stop and think about the choice of the chronotope. In the imaginary, London is consider the city of the law. McEwan sets his story in summer, nay in June. June open the way to summer and at the same time to the story that starts in Medias res. This is in contrast with the month chosen by Dickens: November. November brings with it the end of the beautiful season, nostalgia, and at the same time the end of the studies.