ABSTRACT
P. D. James’s dystopian novel The Children of Men is the focus of this chapter. Set in the year 2021, it depicts a world without any living children. Drawing on Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism, the chapter proposes that while the novel initially puts forward constructivist perspectives of childhood, it soon resorts to a religious narrative that affirms essentialism even more resolutely than The Child in Time, lacking as it does McEwan’s irony and ambivalence. Constructivism remains a tentative project in James’s novel; it is only invoked to be refuted by the birth of a child conceived against all odds. The chapter examines how this turn is implicated in the novel’s narrative structure, which shifts from a first- to a third-person narrator.
