This is a good novel which has got a better novel inside it, trying to get out.
It tells the story of a judge who has to make a difficult decision about whether or not to allow a teenage boy to decline medical treatment because of his religious beliefs. This is the good novel. The better novel, the one that I wish had actually been written, is about the gentle meltdown the judge engages in as she weighs whether or not her apparently ‘successful and happy’ life is in fact at all successful or happy. Her husband tells her he loves her but wants to have an affair so he can feel ‘ecstasy’ one last time before he dies. This sounds pretty reasonable to me, but she takes it hard.
It is at this point that we got bogged down in the actual plot, which is all about this Jehovah’s Witness teenager. Things get very allegorical, and I wasn’t into it. Ian McEwan is obviously a gifted writer, but I’m not really sure where he was going with this one.
Side note, I got this from the same impressively multi-lingual Barcelona apartment bookcase I got this one from, and both were read on the same beach on the same day.