On Saturday (Sometimes) I'm a Litblogger

I've been reading The Children of Men, by P. D. James, a dystopian fantasy about a world in which no children have been born for 25 years, due to an inexplicable plague of infertility that has infected the entire human race. James imagines a civilization in decline, a world without a future. This is my first book by James, and I've got to say she's an author you learn very quickly to respect. Like a modern-day Orwell, her writing seems to be underpinned by a great but unobtrusive intelligence.

The book is full of fine perceptions. Here's a brief passage describing an officer of the SSP (the State Security Police):

Rawlings didn't permit himself the indulgence of personal antipathy any more than he would have allowed himself to feel sympathy, liking, or the stirrings of pity for the victims he visited and interrogated. I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part in the action. It isn't sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill.