The Child in Time (original 1987; edition 1999)

Possibly the best book by McE, though it's not well known. Slight, but very dense, and quite difficult and hard to read especially given its upsetting theme of a lost child. But it's brilliant. ( )

I was disappointed in The Child in Time. I am a big McEwan fan but this lacks a compelling story. Not enough plot and too much feelings, is that the right word. McEwan can do great plots but this left me cold. I didn't really care about any of the characters and certainly not about the blasted committee about children's literacy.

It started so well, a very dramatic disappearance of his child, but then lost its way I thought. ( )

I'm not sure what to make of this novel. It was strange, to say the least. It does have a few hints of time travel in it, sort of. Barely. And it had a few hints of magical realism, sort of. Barely.

But I don't think McEwan was really trying to go the magical realism route - at least not consciously.

I read an essay the other day that examined why "literary" people like magical realism and turn their noses up at normal fantasy. The article proposed that there was a spectrum of fantasy with surreal fantasy on the left and structured fantasy on the right. Magical realism (at least, certain flavors of it) occupies the surreal end of the spectrum, whereas the average epic fantasy is on the far right with rule as to how it's magic and worlds work.

The article then pointed out that, in general, the people who wrote the surreal style magical realism came from more unstable societies (Like Latin America or Salman Rushdie) - and proposed that this lack of structure in life lead to a lack of structure (i.e. surrealism) in their works.

And if you think of it in this fashion, the grief of having your toddler kidnapped and your marriage disintegrate would certainly lead to a lack of structure in your life, so the surrealism would be appropriate.

But... no matter how appropriate it might be, I kept waiting for it to mean something. You have characters wanting to go back in time - some managing it. You have characters wanting to stay frozen in time - some managing it. You have characters wanting to go forward in time - some managing it. There's all this time related imagery. I really wanted it to all tie together and say something coherent, but it just stayed surreal instead. ( )

(Spoiler) I was told that this was a book of ideas, and I guess it is. McEwan certainly explores ideas of time and childhood – but I found it difficult to come to an overall understanding of what he’s saying about time – I could just pick up individual ideas about it like the way time stands still in childhood. How Stephen manages to see his parents and his mother see him when his parents were still coming to terms with her being pregnant with Stephen I’m not sure. I quite like this magic realism although I need to think more about why McEwan makes this connection.

Of course the novel has an impact in its realism too, not just the shocking abduction of Kate but also in McEwan’s descriptions of things English. I felt the rightness of several descriptions of both place and people such as Stephen initially not wanting to make a scene when he can’t find Kate.

There are elements, though, which don’t ring true or which seem too neat. The Prime Minister revealing her love for Charles to Stephen seemed really odd, really unconvincing to me and Charles’ regression to childhood was also more an artificial acting out of a concept than something convincing in itself. The beggars . . . and then there’s the ending – after another childhood experience (being in the cabin of the engine itself, his childhood dream), Charles returns to Julie and everything is sorted out, the new baby making life for them possible again.

In the end, then, I found myself held by the writing but not by the ideas – which is what a lot of people, I think, seem to feel about McEwan. ( )

I'm reviewing this novel some months after I read it and gave it 3.5 stars and I'm now unsure why I gave it such an average rating. What remains in my memory are not details of the plot but impressions of the scenario in which the novel takes place.

That scenario is unremittingly bleak, matching the emotions of two of the main characters, Stephen and Julie, a married coupled who have become estranged following the disappearance and presumed abduction of their daughter, Kate. The novel is set in what, at the time of writing (1987), was a near-future Britain. Although I don't believe the date is ever made explicit, various references suggest it is the late 1990s or early 2000s. Passing reference is made to the Millenium, and an Olympic Games takes place shortly before the events described in the novel.

This future is a dystopian view of what Britain might become if the 1980s Conservative administration had been able to pursue some of their ideals to the utmost, combined with an ever-decreasing gross national product. There are licensed beggars instead of Social Security, public infrastructure which is crumbling and unreliable and the sense of an ever-more-intrusive police state.

Against this background are described the different ways in which the loss of their child affects Steven, Julie and those around them, and what are almost a set of meditations on childhood, memory, time and changing meaning.

McEwan's imagined future now seems somewhat odd. Its dystopian elements are believable even though we now know that thankfully some of them did not come to pass. But echnological change, which sometimes plays a key role in the story, is less well imagined. The protagonists have some kind of home access to remote computers, using something reminiscent of Prestel, but the concept of mobile communications is unknown and a number of plot devices hinge on the difficulty of contacting someone via their home landline when they are themselves mobile.

Throughout, Stephen (a children's author) is involved with a cabinet committee producing a government document on childcare and dealing with the increasingly outlandish behaviour of his friend Charles, a government minister.

The elements are intermixed well, each reinforcing or complementating the other and underlying it all the bleakness of the tragedy which defines the characters' lives. It's not an uplifting read much of the time, although the bureaucracy of government brings odd moments of humour, and the end is most definitely positive in a way that's unexpected. ( )