Tragedy in Ian McEwan’s The Children Act

What is it about?

This essay reads Ian McEwan's The Children Act (2014) as a literary tragedy that is in dialogue with the classical form and with Hegel's definition of tragedy as a collision between two equally valid and equally limited articulations of justice. I argue that McEwan's contemporary tragedy enacts such a collision, by intensifying the polarization between two competing system of values: modern rationality and religious faith. Yet in highlighting where the clash between these two systems turns destructive, McEwan also implicitly points to other possibilities, to paths not taken. The novel implies that conflict devolves to tragedy when the two sides attempt to disentangle from what seems like threatening “otherness,” calling for a more holistic response to conflict.

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