The Child in Time is the most optimistic of McEwan’s novels. It also fizzes with intelligence, and balances intellect with optimism – a rare feat nowadays. Reflecting on his screenplay for the film The Ploughman’s Lunch, McEwan remarked that the characters started out bad, and got worse. Here, they start out wounded, and get better. Though the year is never specified, the setting is plainly England in the 1980s. I don’t know why more isn’t made of the political aspect of the novel. Politics and fiction, of course, tend to go together like pyromaniacs and dynamite factories. The danger of crudeness always beckons. McEwan avoids that. Instead, menace is built up with subtlety. Here and there you see what Britain has become. Begging has become legalised; a government bowl is supplied to down-and-outs, or ones who qualify for it, as part of a warped bid to encourage thrift and independence. Schools are closing or being sold off to private investors; there are rumours of the leaving age being lowered. The State’s role has been recast in simpler terms: uphold the law, defend the government against its enemies. Worse, there is a general ‘instinctive siding in all matters with the strong, the exaltation of self-interest’. Writers become universal by being particular.Our hero is Stephen Lewis, a popular children’s author. His career is a fortunate mistake: he owes his success to his manuscript being delivered to the wrong desk, whose owner duly pulls him out of the slush pile and publishes him to great success. I still find the description of Stephen’s first steps into fiction absorbing, as well as invigoratingly life-like. A good deal of Stephen’s back-story is also McEwan’s. Like McEwan, he has returned from a trip to Afghanistan, taken in a painted bus filled with drug-taking hippies. He has a bad case of dysentery and a craving for order –a trait he shares with Briony from Atonement. Like McEwan, he writes at night by candlelight to add to the romance of the undertaking. The novel he starts is essentially about his travels but, to his amazement, morphs into something completely different. Stephen’s amazement may bring ironic chuckles to some readers, as with his other discoveries. (He wants to be accessible, ‘but not to everyone’.) Canny readers may spot that Stephen’s first visit to his publisher takes place in a cramped, converted broom cupboard, which sounds remarkably similar to the rooms Jonathan Cape’s editors still work in today. As often happens with McEwan, the plot grows from a tragic incident. Stephen’s little daughter Kate is kidnapped while visiting the supermarket. McEwan, it must be said, pulls of the scene with enviable panache. I can remember the chill I felt while reading this in my late teens: the feeling has not weakened now that I am 34, and an expectant Father. While keeping his prose clear and smooth, he captures the numbed, stop-start way we view our crises. He also probes the tragedy’s aftermath with lethal accuracy, and we feel each step. Stephen passes through a frenzied period of list-making, door-to-door campaigning, followed by alcoholic grief, and attempts to rationalise (she may have been taken by an infertile couple). Without realising it, Stephen catches himself looking at passing children for phantom Kates. He still buys her birthday presents, in the hopes she will suddenly walk through the door and claim them, like offerings to a lost goddess. His marriage ends, and Stephen fills his days drinking Scotch on the sofa, raging while still in his underwear at the TV.Normality continues to be ruptured, and things start to mend. There is a scene where Stephen stops by a country pub, and sees, via some sort of hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum, a vision of a woman Stephen knows in his bones is his Mother while still young and pregnant with him. It is later revealed that his Mother remembers a vision of a ghostly child looking at her through a window. That vision, she divulges, was what persuaded her to keep her child. ‘It was the window now, a complete self, begging her for its existence, and it was inside her, unfolding intricately, living off the pulse of her blood. [...] She felt herself to be in love with it, whoever it was. A love affair had begun.’ I can’t think of many writers that have affirmed the importance and primacy of the family in their work as Ian McEwan has, and entirely without ‘moral majority’ pomposity. Soon later, Stephen and his wife reconcile and conceive a new child to replace Kate. They realise they can’t retrieve the past, and come to feel – which is a much harder thing than to merely know – that they have to go forwards. The birthing scene that closes the book is, for my money, the most artfully conceived of all McEwan’s endings, and has that rarest of things: a thoroughly earned, convincing happy ending.True, the novel isn’t perfect. McEwan succumbs to the urge to tell rather than show much too often. One character exists solely to info-dump on the reader, in a sub-plot that doesn’t merge with complete success into the main plot. A lot of the novel’s discursive scaffolding has been left intact, when it should have been dismantled long before the final draft. But the novel survives its own shortcomings, and has an emotional punching power rarely bettered in McEwan’s oeuvre. All parents should read it.
A superb book about every parent's worst nightmare (a child goes missing), but you don't need to be a parent to appreciate it because it is primarily a story of loss, family (is it a couple, parents and children or a patriarchal institution such as the RAF?), distortions in (the perception of) time and reality, and of growing up and of regressing. Stephen Lewis is a children's author who also sits on a government committee that is meant to produce a handbook on childrearing - to regenerate the UK. He takes his 3 year old daughter, Kate, to the supermarket, where she is abducted. The rest of the story charts the effects on him, his marriage, his relationship with his parents, and his work. His life is marked by reacting to circumstances rather than instigating things and thus he is even more adrift once Kate is lost.It is full of painful ironies (Stephen making policy about parenthood, yet losing his own child, while a friend effectively gains one) and wonderful imagery: in a lonely flat the "deadly alignment of familiar possessions... the stubborn conspiracy of objects... to remain exactly as they had been"; the committee meeting with "vestigial stateliness and dozy bureaucracy mingling soporifically"; making love "sleepily, inconclusively"; "The lost child was everyone's property. But Simon was alone."; "Nappies proclaimed from diagrammatic metal trees a surrender to new life"; a mother "whose worrying was a subtle form of possessiveness" and, on a train, the “customary search for the loneliest seat”.Time is elastic, capricious, malleable, parallel and relative. There are episodes where it seems to speed up, slow down, or short circuit. A train leaving London travels "from the past into the present" in an architectural but also metaphorical sense and Stephen's parents condense all their history into souvenirs in a single room. Time slows down, cinematically, in a collision, stretches out in an endless cornfield and "time would stop" without the fantasy of her [Kate's:] continued existence". "Duration shaped itself around the intensity of the event". One of the characters is a physicist who explains something of this, but some incidents are neither explained nor, perhaps, explicable.It is set in roughly the present day, although it was written in 1987 and you realise how much the world has changed in barely 20 years: there is no mobile phone at a crucial point, public fear of strangers was clearly much less and the tactics of parents and police are very different from the Madeleine McCann case.Unlike other McEwans I have read, this has touches of magical realism (mainly regarding the nature and experience of time) and has some humorous political satire too (he "hoped to discover what is was they thought in the process of saying it"), but works very well.It would have been a comfortable 5*, but I disliked the ending, so dropped it to 4*. If he were writing it now, I suspect it would end differently.
What do You think about The Child In Time (1999)?
Wow, what an unexpected story. The loss of a child almost becomes a minor theme to the effects the occurrence has on those who remain. Beautifully written, it’s a story that exudes so much humanity and the reality of sadness. McEwan has a unique gift with his writing and I felt consistently confronted with what I would do if I suffered the same circumstance. For instance, how does ones day end when your child is abducted? Can it? How inconsolable it must feel. How unimaginable his wretched sense of guilt and despair and anger. What’s amazing to me is how much of myself I put into this story, no matter how inconceivable. I am nothing like the main character Stephen yet, I felt every ounce of every day of his story. You might say it’s because I have a child, two in fact. But I think that would be wrong. I believe it’s because of the author, of whom I am now a fan. A fan of how McEwan constructs his story as a series of progressive “events” that lead you through various moments in Stephen’s life and his evolving mindset. And each of the supporting characters, including the VERY brief amount of time we spend with his daughter Kate, are as well developed, living out their personal issues interwoven with Stephen’s and afflicted by their extremely delicate realities.
—Tad
I love Ian McEwan, I really do. And I'm glad I didn't start off with this book, because I think it would've put me off him if I hadn't already devoured Atonement and Saturday.The book started well, and the scenes of Kate's disappearance were chilling. McEwan was inside his characters' minds wholly, and as usual, I became lost to the protagonist's deep thoughts.Around half way through, it started to go downhill. Stephen seemed to change suddenly, for no reason I could fathom - almost as though Mc
—Caela Harrison
Childhood is magical.There is a myth, or at least a misconception, that this is a result of children being innocent. If you have ever been a child, then if you look deep into your heart, you will recognize this as the lie we tell ourselves to conceal the painful truth. Childhood is magical because it is inaccessible. Once gone, it can never be reclaimed, revisited, redone. It is lost to us except through the unreliable route of memories and mementos. Childhood is almost like a separate, first lifetime—a dream of something we did in the past, before we grew up and entered the world of adults.As children, our world is timeless. We perceive the passage of time, the measurement of time, quite differently. Summers are almost infinite stretches of warm days and improvised games. Winters are endless opportunities for snowmen and snowball fights. Time is fluid and flexible: friends forever, then enemies the next day. In the worlds we create in our backyards, it can be the day before yesterday just as easily as it can be years into the future: our narratives are seldom linear; we’ve yet to yield to the adult idea that fiction needs to “make sense”. Make-believe is a process, not a product, and best done when not entirely serious.As adults, we can of course strive to retain some of these qualities. I know many people who possess childlike exuberance, as well as a sense of wonder and imagination that serves them well. I try to keep these qualities too. But unless we take the extreme measure, as Charles Darke does in this book, of opting out of adult society, we can never be children. As adults our lives are relentlessly scheduled: transit, meetings, classes, deadlines, duties, chores. We are, all of us, obsessed with the question, “What time is it?” and have developed ever more accurate and precise ways to measure the passage of time so we always know the answer. One might balk at this characterization, but who doesn’t have to be some place at some particular time sometimes? This necessity to be aware of time is a very adult thing, and it is what separates us from our childhood.The Child in Time puts childhood under a microscope and peers at what separates us from children. Stephen Lewis’ three-year-old daughter was abducted from a supermarket. Years later, he has separated from his wife and finds himself serving on a government committee drafting a report for a new child-rearing document. The British government of the future Ian McEwan imagines is a somewhat paternalistic, authoritarian one: the government knows best. Lewis seems to be sleepwalking through his life, still unable to move on after losing his daughter. He is peculiarly apathetic toward everything: politics, his relationship with his wife, his career as an “accidental” children’s author.Indeed, most of my issues with this book stem from its unremarkable narrative. Stephen Lewis seems to stumble from scene to scene, and with the story slipping from his past to the present without much knowledge, it can get confusing. His walk is largely aimless, for he does not seize upon a purpose or a desire until the end of the book. Meanwhile, most of the interesting things around him are told to us rather than shown. Thelma tells us about Charles, with Charles himself only briefly making an appearance. Stephen tells us about his parents; his mom tells us about Stephen’s conception … there is a lot of dialogue and exposition. I had trouble enjoying this book simply because it feels so bland.But at the same time, there is so much happening! The government wants to release a creepy child-rearing manual that’s supposed to restore the morals of the nation. Beggars can get licenses to beg and must wear badges identifying them as such. Stephen’s best friend, Charles, resigns as a Member of Parliament so he can become a recluse seeking to recapture his lost childhood. (Although Thelma eventually explains the reasons, I didn’t find it entirely satisfactory.)I guess The Child in Time is a fairly interesting smattering of ideas, all of which have something to do with childhood. There is a sense of regret over the loss of childhood, whether it is through maturity or through abduction. There is the difficulty associated with recovering from that trauma, the tension between Stephen and his wife Julie that finally crystallizes and shatters in the novel’s final pages. The ending of this book is really good—disproportionately so compared to the rest of the story.Like so many other books, The Child in Time falls into that uncomfortable category of books that have some merit even though, alas, I didn’t really enjoy reading them. I can see why others would, but for reasons related to McEwan’s style and characterization, the greatness of this book eludes me.(Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about Stephen Lewis as I read this.)
—Ben Babcock
