SOURCE: "The Decline and Fall of the Human Race," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 4, 1993, p. 12.

In the following review, Sallis argues that James fails in her intentions in The Children of Men.

There is but one liberty: to come to terms with death, Camus wrote, after which all things are possible.

It is not individual death that James confronts in her new novel[, The Children of Men,] but the potential death of the human race itself. Suddenly, mysteriously, humankind has stopped bearing children. Values have collapsed. Apathy blankets what activity remains.

There is, of course, no art; museums and all our grand ambitions stand unattended; government-sponsored porn shops attempt to flog what sexual, creative drive lies dormant. "Human mules deprived of posterity," men and women endure the rag ends of their lives. Women push dolls in elaborate prams about the streets; men preserve what empty social...