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As newspapers are filled with the story of a British couple arrested for taking their son from a hospital to seek medical treatment in Spain, we wonder, who should be held responsible for the sick child: his parents, his doctors, or the law? Ian McEwan addresses these questions in his thirteenth novel, The Children Act. Fiona Maye is an esteemed High Court judge in the Family Division, whose husband of 35 years tells her in the opening pages that he intends to pursue an affair with a younger woman. The breakdown of their marriage, and their attempts to resolve it, weave in and out of the central narrative, and provide the most painfully realistic and engaging moments in the novel. The same night that her husband storms off, she has to decide whether or not to order a blood transfusion for the critically ill 17-year-old Adam, a Jehovah’s Witness. McEwan is an avowed atheist, yet he choreographs the child’s case to be legally and morally thorny, presenting the surgeon as haughty and condescending, and acknowledging that the boy is just three months shy of 18, when he will gain the right to make his own healthcare choices. The crisp, compulsively readable first half revolves around the interactions between the childless, faithless heroine and the devout boy. Fiona is an elegantly drawn, believable character, yet Adam remains an undeveloped, sporadic presence. The novel seems to lose the run of itself following her judgement, becoming convoluted with a series of highly improbable plot developments. The Children Act reads like a short story forced into a novel, and these plot twists may be a lazy attempt to introduce dramatic tension into an otherwise beautifully subtle story. McEwan has acknowledged that the closing pages of the novel include an explicit homage to The Dead, James Joyce’s finest short story, yet this ending won’t stay with you into the night.