The Child in Time

Slow and stately, this was closer to Atonement than the other McEwan books I’ve read (Enduring Love, which I will shortly have to try to recall in detail, and The Cement Garden) in terms of tone, but certainly distinct in its own right.

I enjoy McEwan’s directness and emphasis on story and ideas over style, but he can be rather ponderous at times, and this book sometimes dragged.

However, it had moments of real magnificence. Stephen Lewis is a published writer who wrote his debut novel intending it for serious literary readers, only to have it published to great acclaim as a children’s book. This amusing history, however, gives way to a truly horrifying fate. One day Lewis takes his little daughter Kate to the supermarket. While he is distracted, she vanishes – almost certainly abducted. This truly chilling event of course has huge implications, and Lewis’ life is irrevocably changed. His relationship with his wife crumbles and they drift apart, unable to communicate their loss. He becomes obsessed, constantly looking for his daughter in groups of children, or getting lost in memories of her. Stephen’s journey is painful and arduous, but the inevitable conclusion to the story comes in a truly memorable sequence that brings renewed hope, changing Stephen’s view that time ‘forbids second chances’ and bringing a real sense of optimism in a perhaps obvious but still uplifting fashion.

Written in the 80s, the story is set in the near future, with a thinly-veiled Thatcher still in power. Along with licensing beggars, Mrs. Thatcher has assembled a group of impressive-sounding spokespeople to attach their names to a report on how best to raise children, even though their input will be totally disregarded. The political commentary was an unwelcome addition, mostly because it seemed petty and reductive, and only pointed out the obvious flaws in bureaucracy. Similarly the compacted explorations of (now dated, naturally) theoretical physics. But both are necessary because McEwan wants to examine his two major themes – the child and time – in as many ways as possible. However, these asides are almost entirely irrelevant to the main story, and most affecting statement: that of a man coping with the loss of a child, the desire to live in the past and the impression that time has ceased for those who lose the most important things in their lives.

Additional complications, like a friend of the protagonist’s who regresses with alarming physical adequacy to childhood and an exciting but arbitrary motorway accident added only to show time slowing to a crawl in an emergency seem like padding, detracting from the far more striking scenes, such as the memory of the day Kate goes missing, Stephen’s own childhood and a delusional Stephen’s surreal invasion of a school when he thinks he has seen his daughter, but in the end, the book was satisfying and melancholy, and haunting for anyone, especially parents.