Do I detect a new genre of film and novel emerging about below-replacement fertility? The first that came to my attention was Alfonso Cuarón's bleak film Children of Men. This was set in the UK in 2027, when global fertility has mysteriously dropped to 0.00. P.D. James's novel with the same title, upon which thefilm is based, is, if anything, bleaker still.

Now I see that Booker Prize winner Anita Brookner has published a new novel, Strangers, about a retired bank manager who has no wife, no children and no relatives. It is "a brilliant and affecting creation," according to Sebastian Smee's review in the London Spectator. Paul Sturgis is "haunted by a feeling of invisibility", reflecting on what "a terrible thing [it is] to live without witnesses." "His habits," writes Brookner, "were ineradicably solitary"; "a sadness.... had become the very climate of his life."

His only relative is a distant cousin whom he visits out of a sense of obligation because he senses that it is "essential to possess not only a relative but a relative who would prove to be near at hand." Alas, she drops off her perch half-way through the book and Sturgis's life becomes even more lonely and meaningless.

Not exactly a pageturner to snuggle under the covers with and read by flashlight, I think. But the portrait of an ageing gentleman in London rings true. In societies where many, if not most, people have had only one child, their only relatives are ancestors. Novelists are better at imagining the consequences than the Optimum Population Trust. Is it better to have a big family, a big and blotchy carbon footprint, and happiness? Or no family, a faint smudge of a carbon footprint and an old age of quiet desperation?

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