McEwan is very interested in obsession, in small events that mean little to one person, but everything to someone else. (Also in narratives told by people trying to make sense out of a situation by reconstructing what they think might have or could have happened, but that isn't as applicable here.) In this case, the moment that spurs obsession is important to both people involved, but one is able to walk away and the other follows, with repercussions that are troubling in their mundanity and lack of poetry.
In the Children Act, Fiona is a judge in family court in the U.K. She mostly oversees divorce cases, custody agreements, separation and alimony. A few of her cases reach the level of national news, as she is a judge at the highest level of this court.
Her home life is a mess - after a protracted period of sexlessness, her husband proposes that they stay together but open their marriage up. AKA, he wants to have sex with someone, and if she's not interested, he has a someone in mind. Fiona does not take this well, with an anger and betrayal that is both understandable and frustrating when she refuses to consider any valid points he might be making as well. It is an anger that only admits of one side, unlike her work, where she tries to balance competing interests and come up with answers that leave both feeling like they didn't quite get what they wanted. She won't go anywhere near that as a solution here though - it's all or nothing, and no in-between is possible.
As she's reeling from this, she's faced with a new case - a young Jehovah's witness, only three months under the age of majority and full control over his own medical decisions, has leukemia, and is refusing treatment. The hospital is suing to gain temporary custody, to force treatment that includes blood transfusions.
I'm not going to talk about the eventual ruling she comes to too much, but it does feel like this is very different in British law than Canadian. Because I've played a Jehovah's Witness for medical students many times, I know that there isn't a clearcut age at which people get to make their own medical decisions - there are guidelines, but a great deal of it rests on the ability of the person to recognize both the dangers and possible outcomes, and to make a decision that could be accepted as reasonably adult. It's a sliding scale, and assessments like Fiona does here (I keep wanting to call her Ruth for some reason - why is that?) would be part of the process, absolutely. But the letter of the law wouldn't be that much help. (And honest to goodness, being three months too young to make your own medical decisions would be extraordinarily likely to be deemed competent.)
It is the letter of the law Fiona relies on here, when she decides that those three months make all the difference. The boy, Adam, lives, and when he realizes his parents are happy he did so, loses his faith. He pushes them away, but as much as he might see it as a freeing of himself, he's trying to exchange one authority for another. That's where the obsession comes in. He starts to see Fiona as wise beyond just the parameters of her decision - someone who could teach him how to live, if she'd just let him come and live with her and learn from her.
While the decision was important to Fiona, Adam's life isn't important to her own in the same way, and she, with a few missteps, does not incorporate him into her life. Adam, who really is very young, sees that as another authority rejecting her, and what he does next proceeds from there, and from being at sea in a world drastically different than the one he thought he was living in. Wanting certainty, he doesn't get it in the judge who made the decision that changed his life.
It's an interesting book, with tension and things not said, expectations not expressed, running all the way through it. Probably firmly on the liked but didn't love scale.
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