The Child in Time (original) (raw)
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2,344 reviews2,277 followers
IL TEMPO FUTURO È CONTENUTO NEL TEMPO PASSATO
Lennart Anderson: Still Life with Kettle. 1977
Uno dei primi romanzi scritti da McEwan (mi pare sia il terzo) e uno dei primi che ho letto. Forse quello che ho amato di più, probabilmente ex aequo con un altro early McEwan, The Innocent – Lettera a Berlino.
Ed è come se McEwan fosse cresciuto insieme al suo mondo, è come se per la prima volta si occupasse di adulti – per quanto il titolo faccia riferimento all’infanzia – è come se avesse abbandonato il suo primigenio universo popolato di e dominato da adolescenti.
Padre e figlia
La trama, per quanto ramificata, si può condensare all’osso: famiglia quasi perfetta, lui, Stephen, scrittore di successo di libri per l’infanzia, lei Julie, e la piccola Kate tre anni. Stephen va al supermercato con la bimba, la mette sul carrello, arriva alla cassa, e scopre che Kate non c’è più. La cerca, la fa cercare, ma Kate non si trova, è sparita.
È una bambina, singolare non plurale, che si perde nel tempo, come chiarisce il titolo originale.
Qualche attimo prima che Kate sparisca.
Come la morte di Susie Salmon in Lovely Bones, anche la sparizione di Kate sfalda la coppia all’apparenza perfetta e consolidata: lui rimane in città a elaborare un’assenza che ha molti aspetti del lutto, lei si trasferisce in un cottage in campagna (nella magnifica campagna inglese).
Chiaro che il senso di colpa di Stephen è smisurato: era lui l’adulto responsabile di Kate nel momento in cui è scomparsa – anche se Julie non gliene fa una colpa, Stephen può davvero alleggerirsi la coscienza? E Julie può davvero essere così comprensiva e tollerante, nel fondo non pensa che Stephen avrebbe dovuto stare più attento, evitare…?
Come in Lovely Bones, anche qui è il padre che sembra non darsi per vinto, che cerca, insegue: Stephen passa giornate intere a cercare Kate. Mentre Julie si allontana, va in un’altra direzione, sconfina in un dolore quasi più estatico.
Julie e Stephen
Cos’è successo a Kate: rapita, uccisa, rubata da chi vuole il figlio che non può avere, o cos’altro? Stephen si macera con questi pensieri. Che faccia avrà sua figlia qualche anno dopo, come sarà cresciuta – se è cresciuta – come è cambiata, saprebbe riconoscerla…?
Poi ci sono altri rami di trama, che partono e si ricollegano al tronco principale: la coppia di amici cari di Stephen, Charles e Thelma – la commissione governativa sull’educazione all’infanzia – i genitori di Stephen.
Ma sono occasioni per approfondire e ampliare il tema clou – o almeno quello che io ho percepito essere il centro del racconto – un’assenza che sa di morte, l’elaborazione di un dolore che non si riesce a colmare, a sciogliere.
Può una nascita compensare una perdita come quella di Kate che non si trova più?
Impressiona apprendere – non dal romanzo, ma da altre fonti – il numero consistente di bambini, di tutte le età, che spariscono, sono rapiti, sequestrati, non tornano più indietro…
Come indica il titolo del romanzo, come sottolineo anch’io nel mio titolo che fa riferimento a un verso di Eliot citato da Thelma, Il tempo presente e il tempo passato/ sono forse presenti entrambi nel tempo futuro, il Tempo è un elemento fondamentale del racconto. Il tempo sembra congelarsi nell’attimo in cui Kate scompare, il tempo si riavvolge nel ricordo di Stephen che ripercorre la sua infanzia approdando in una dimensione della memoria che sembra condurlo fuori dal tempo: la memoria, si sa, modifica, non soltanto il tempo. E quindi, se nel bambino convive l’adulto che sarà, così nello ieri è contenuto l’oggi e il domani. Il tempo ha tutto meno che un percorso lineare.
Il tempo di Stephen non è più quello di Julie: e quello di Kate non sarà mai quello dei suoi genitori.
McEwan riesce a essere ironico anche trattando un dolore tanto devastante. E riesce a essere sarcastico nei momenti in cui dalla pagina emerge l’Inghilterra thatcheriana.
Il romanzo è diventato un film per la TV con Benedict Cumberbatch nel ruolo di Stephen. Conferma del buon e fecondo rapporto tra la settima arte e la letteratura di McEwan.
Ho già ricordato il bel libro di Alice Sebold che Peter Jackson ha adattato per il grande schermo mantenendo lo stesso titolo, ma con minor maestria. Ricordo anche una bella serie inglese ma ambientata in Francia, The Missing, dove a sparire è un maschietto.
1,232 reviews4,820 followers
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 child-rearing - 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.
Language
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".
* On a train, the “customary search for the loneliest seat”.
Contemporary Past
It is set in roughly the present day of when it was written: 1987. It made me acutely aware of 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 than now, and the tactics of parents and police are very different from the Madeleine McCann case.
That made for a rather slippery feel about the period, which fits with the aspects of temporal elasticity that are also hinted at.
McEwan does Magical Realism?
Unlike other McEwans I have read, this has touches of magical realism (mainly regarding the nature and experience of time) .
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.
A Sprinkling of Satire?
This also has some humorous political satire that I don't associate with McEwan (he "hoped to discover what is was they thought in the process of saying it"), but it works very well.
Damp Squib
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.
TV Adaptation in 2017
I'm looking forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role: CiT on IMDB. I may have to read or skim to book first, to see if the ending is as McEwan wrote it, how I wanted it (eight years later, I don't remember what that was), or something else.
death-grief-bereavement-mortality family-parenting magical-realism
115 reviews128 followers
Atroce.
Sono molto confusa, è stato come se non fosse nemmeno McEwan. Letto forse nel momento sbagliato?
Non sono riuscita a immaginare delle persone al di là della pagina che avevo davanti. È rimasto tutto piatto e inanimato: personaggi, trama, stile...
Purtroppo, non ho ritrovato lo scrittore di Nel guscio, da me tanto amato.
Ho portato a termine la lettura unicamente per potermi ricredere ma non è andata così, il finale ha solo confermato l’enorme delusione.
classici-moderni con-recensione decisamente-no
988 reviews1,997 followers
Aaahbsolute shite. The extra star is for the handsome writerly (Britishy) prose.* Other than that, yup: Shite!
Turns out McEwan is the most polarizing writer I've ever encountered. The more stuff of his I read the more I am convinced that someone else wrote the gorgeous epic Atonement, not this classicist douche bag. The dude will let you know which caste he belongs to, it is way above yours. Even the Prime Minister plays a part in our protagonist's "life."
REVOLTINGGG. Perhaps this aspect, my nausea, makes it ART??
*McEwan is an obvious mimic of Woolf--with near clinical insights that break narrative credibility and he loves the same story (Saturday, Comfort of Strangers, Enduring Love) about horrendous violent interchanges (fake!) between the rich and members of the general unwashed...
738 reviews913 followers
«Ο παρών χρόνος και ο παρελθών χρόνος
είναι ίσως και οι δύο παρόντες στο μέλλοντα χρόνο
και ο μέλλων χρόνος να περιέχεται στον παρελθόντα χρόνο».
Τ.Σ Έλιοτ.
Ήταν μια πρώτη επαφή γνωριμίας, ένα πρώτο επιφυλακτικό, αναγνωστικό ραντεβού με τον
Ίαν ΜακΓιούαν και δηλώνω επιεικώς ενθουσιασμένη.
Με κάθε χτύπημα της πένας του με απορροφούσε
και με γκρεμοτσάκιζε απο τα υπέροχα ύψη της πλαστικής ουτοπίας, στα βάθη της καταραμένης δυστοπίας, λίγο πριν με ξεγελάσει με μια αμφίβολη ευτοπία.
Μου χάριζε λόγια, αναλύσεις, προβληματισμούς, ιδέες, διάφορα μέσα, συναισθήματα πολύ έντονα, λυπημένα, ενθουσιασμένα, απαισιόδοξα, χαρούμενα, αγανακτισμένα, μετριοπαθή, δυναμικά.
Όλα αυτά που προσπάθησε να μου δώσει φυσικά και έχουν ειπωθεί και γραφτεί σε άπειρους συγγραφικούς και καλλιτεχνικούς χωροχρόνους.
Όμως εκείνος, πήρε τους πιο μεγάλους φόβους του ανθρώπινου είδους και μπήκε σε ένα ξέφρενο κυνήγι σκέψης, στην αναζήτηση της κρυμμένης ουσίας με επιδεξιότητα, σαφήνεια και πολυεπίπεδο όραμα.
Το «χαμένο παιδί» του τίτλου δεν είναι ένα άτομο, μια τρομακτική συλλογή καταστάσεων για ένα παιδάκι που εξαφανίζεται απο την ζωή αυτών που γέννησαν τη δική του ζωή,κάπου, κάποτε.
Δεν ειναι απλώς αυτός ο καταραμένος χωροχρόνος
με μηδενική, ατελείωτη, ίσως μη μετρήσιμη διάρκεια, για ένα παιδί που εξαφανίζεται. Ούτε γι’αυτούς που θα περιμένουν την επιστροφή του μέχρι να λιώσει η ψυχή τους.
Το «χαμένο παιδί» είναι πολλά άτομα, είναι παραλληλισμοί μεταξύ παιδικής ηλικίας και ενηλικίωσης.
Λογική και τρέλα που απεικονίζονται μέ��α
απο μια σειρά παιδικών στιγμών, τόσο κυριολεκτικών όσο και μεταφορικών, εικονικών, εμμονικών,
κάνοντας το βιβλίο να λειτουργεί σε πάμπολλα επίπεδα.
Ένα τραγικό γεγονός οδηγεί σε μια περίοδο αποσύνθεσης, παραίτησης, κατάρρευσης και στην εξερεύνηση πολλαπλών θεμάτων.
Μια δεξιοτεχνία συνυφασμένων ιστοριών επικεντρωμένων στον πρωταγωνιστή Στίβεν Λιούις προ��φέρει μία βαθιά εξερεύνηση της φύσης του προσωπικού και του ιδιωτικού.
Αυτοί οι δυο κόσμοι αντιπαρατίθενται με λεπτότητα και με εξαιρετική διαύγεια.
Το «παιδί» είναι ταυτόχρονα ο κεντρικός χαρακτήρας,
η φύση των παιδιών, η ανατροφή τους, το παιδί που υπάρχει και ζει μέσα σε όλους μας,
η παλινδρομική του εξουσιαστική δύναμη στους ενήλικες, η χαμένη παιδικότητα που έχει φίλη την αυτοκτονία όταν την ανακαλείς στην μεσήλικη ζωή, όταν δεν θέλεις πια να την κρύβεις.
Το «χαμένο» ομοίως αναφέρεται σε χρόνους που δεν αναζητήθηκαν, στην ζωή, στις ζωές γενικά και πολύ ειδικά.
Χαμένος ο συγκεκριμένος χρόνος της ιστορίας μας, μέσα στον καθαρό χρόνο που υπάρχει και γεννάει συμπτώσεις, δράσεις, αδράνειες, συγχρονισμούς συνάφειας και μυστικιστικών δυνατοτήτων
της φυσικής που αλλάζει και πάντα ίδια μένει.
Έτσι,στην υπόθεση του χαμένου παιδιού, αναμειγνύονται τα πνευματικά στοιχεία της ιστορίας,
με την φύση του χρόνου, τον συναισθηματικό λαβύρινθο των ηρώων, και το ταξίδι μέσα στην απώλεια
του πατέρα που χάνει το παιδί του
και μας ταυτίζει σουρεαλιστικά με τον τρόμο.
Ο ΜακΓιούαν γνωρίζει την πολυπλοκότητα και την νομοτέλεια της ζωής.
Μέσα απο ένα γραμμικό μέσο καταφέρνει να δώσει τρισδιάστατη απεικόνιση των καταστάσεων
με απόλυτη προσήλωση και προσοχή,
με πίστη και απίστευτο ταλέντο.
ώστε να μην παρεκκλίνει πολύ,η ζωή, απο το μικροσκοπικό του όραμα.
✍🏻💥💥💥💥
Καλή ανάγνωση
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
humming-closer-no-hesitation-give-m
353 reviews944 followers
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... oh yes, where was I? Mmm, reviewing The Child in Time by Ian McEwan...I remember now. To summarise; an overview of what it is to
a) be a child
b) have a child
c) lose a child
d) regress to a child like state (with the finally irony being that once you've gone through the first three and spend a lot of the book daydreaming about what it would be like to get your child back, you choose to ignore and abandon your friend who, for reasons of a personal/mental health/ sexual nature has decided to regress to child-like behaviour including the wearing of short pants but not before producing a government sanctioned idiots guide to child rearing along the way).
Yes, yes children are important. They remind us of that on a daily basis. Some do it by screaming bloody murder a lot of the time. Mind you some adults I know scream bloody murder a lot of the time too. Is that a sign of their inner child escaping? My inner child says me no like this book very much (and then threw it on the floor while having a small tantrum).
1001-books bookcrossing-books read-in-2011
1,820 reviews
My fourth book by Ian McEwan. Enduring Love. Amsterdam. Atonement. The more I read his works, the more I get convinced that he is the author who knows how my brain is wired. He knows what I want, what I expect from my reading, how I would like my brain to be stimulated, how to keep me awake and keep on reading till the wee hours of the morning.
Reading his books is like drinking a perfect blend: just enough decaf coffee, enough non-fat milk and brown sugar. Those are healthy choices because had I been younger, my perfect author would have been John Green or Suzanne Collins and the coffee components would have been expresso, coffeemate and refined sugar. The taste does shift as people grow older and wiser.
This 1987 book is included in the 100 Must Read Books for Men and I used to wonder why. Ian McEwan is not the type of writer like Mark Bowden with his Black Hawk Down or Anthony Burgess and his Junky. McEwan is a sensitive author and his prose, though sexless, would cater more on contemporary readers with discriminating (ehem) taste just like my lady friends here in Goodreads. I am not saying that my taste is already the same as theirs (I am still hoping and trying to catch up) since they've read far more books than I would have wanted to.
Back to McEwan.
The reason why this book is included in men's must reads is because McEwan puts man into an operating room and slices him up to know what he is made off and bares his soul. Stephen Lewis, a father lost his 3-year old daughter, Kate. Grieving while sitting as a member of a government committee on child care (irony of ironies), he gets delusional and starts to see his young self as a face in the window looking at her young parents. During these delusional moments, he gets to examine his relationship with his parents as a child in time, i.e., young Stephen who does not get old. He also gets to examine his relationship with his wife Julie, his friend Drake and his wife Thelma who is a quantum physicist providing the theories about man's relationship with time. The story is a bit hard to follow if you do not concentrate as the delusional or flashback moments as they seem to be an unexpected reaction of a father when his child was abducted. I mean, at that point when Kate goes missing, I was expecting Stephen and or Julie to do a Beth Cappadora in Jacqueline Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) crying, shouting while running to and fro the hotel lobby where her Ben got lost. McEwan did not spend a lot of time on that and focused on what goes on in the heart of a grieving man. Of course, he did his frantic share of looking for Kate, but McEwan chose to focus on Stephen's self-examination of his life after the loss. The departure to what I was expecting made this book a worthwhile read and Stephen Lewis is one of the must-know and must-appreciate literary characters in man's world.
More and more books for McEwan and me.
1,279 reviews49 followers
I had high hopes for this one having heard good things about it but although there were elements I liked, I thought it was trying to reconcile too many incompatible elements and some of it seemed rather silly.
The first part, in which the protagonist loses his daughter when she is apparently abducted in a supermarket, could have been the basis of a stronger but shorter story. Instead we get a lot of pseudo science about the elasticity of time, a near future (in 1987 terms) in which the Thatcher government lasts longer, and a lot of stuff about the nature of childhood experience.
I can't resist commenting on one ludicrous detail - not only can I see no way a sleeper train from Scotland would ever have been diverted through Suffolk, but even if it did it wouldn't arrive until much later than 1 a.m. and it wouldn't stop to pick up passengers at a small rural station.
Some interesting ideas but rather too obviously flawed for me to go any higher than three stars.
265 reviews62 followers
Ok, that's it. I'm done with Ian McEwan. This book was total bullshit.
This was my third book by the author, and this is why I don't like reading too much by the same writer, especially popular "NYT best-seller" authors. I purchased this book because I thought it was going to be about a three year old girl (Kate) who gets kidnapped at a supermarket while out with her dad. True, McEwan wastes no time in describing the kidnapping in the very first chapter of the book, but after that the rest is about inane shit that has little or nothing to do with the kidnapping, guilt, loss and anguish that would normally occur after such a tragic event. I despised the main character of the book. In true McEwan fashion Stephen Lewis (Kate's father) is a pretentious self-centered snob.
There was not an ounce of angst, despair, madness, or desperation you'd expect in a book about a child who has been kidnapped and whose parents are suppose to be in mourning. The story is about Stephen, who often visits his friends in the county. Who btw never bring up his daughter. He also saved a man from a car-wreck, and he's often in a meeting in which child welfare is the topic of discussion. It was a very flat, boring drawn-out story. The chapters were so long... so tedious. It's infuriating to be strung along so many chapters without so much of a mention of what these parents were supposedly going through! It didn't compel me to feel any sympathy for him or his wife. This was one of the worst novels I've ever read.
1,923 reviews635 followers
"The Child in Time" is an unusual book with themes of childhood and time. It starts with a terrifying event for any parent--a child is kidnapped in a grocery store. The book explores the effect of this tragedy on the father Stephen, his relationship with his wife, and their different styles of grieving the loss of their daughter.
The author, Ian McEwan, plays with time using magical realism where Stephen's present time morphs into an episode in his parents' past. We see how time can speed up or slow down in our minds depending on whether we are relaxed or in a state of panic (such as a traffic accident). Mentions of time are sprinkled throughout the book.
Some incidents revolve around the idea that there is a future adult in a growing child, and a bit of the child remains in an adult. One adult character is trying to experience the childhood he always wished he had. Stephen is a member of a government commission on childcare and literacy where the members hear various theories about childhood. Some experts want a child to be a mini-adult, but others want to prolong childhood.
The book also has some amusing political satire as well as some scary thoughts about the possibility of a nuclear war. Since I'm not British I'm sure I missed some of the references to the Thatcher years.
"The Child in Time" is slow and introspective. While it's not a book that everyone will enjoy, it will make the reader think. I gave the book four stars because McEwan writes well, and his ideas are creative and different.
1001-books contemporary-fiction england
1,381 reviews740 followers
I need to remind myself that talented and established authors such as these compose high quality literary fiction. This genre doesn't always suit my tastes, but this one appealed to me years ago, about the premise of a man losing his young daughter in a crowded supermarket. Kate was only three years old, a loving and most adored cherub.
My latest book project has been to source as many books on audio that I can, and in doing this, I have been giving away (or donating) about 50 books, which is making more space!
The abduction of a child is awful, and this was covered well, the angst and anxiety faced by a father was palpable. The description of beggars in the street, the difference between the trolley items of the upper class and working class stark.
This was odd though. The police lost interest in the case after a week, as some kind of rioting had taken place and that was that. Running parallel to this story of the abducted child was that of a parliamentary enquiry of child care and literacy that was odd; Stephen was a children's author (even the back ground to this was odd, his success was fraudulent). Stephen's attendance at these meetings showed a lack of interest, he was losing his grip; everything was grey. This story in its entirety was tinged with grey.
Stephen and his wife are falling further and further apart, their worlds wasting away. It becomes apparent as this story continues that no one cares about the search for this missing young girl, and Stephen's meanderings to hold onto the memory of his daughter was quite depressing.
All in all this quite good considering the genre is not for me, I need to remind myself of this when approaching novels such as these. I am happy for three stars. Many others would enjoy this more than I, and this wasn't a long book by any means.
books-i-gave-away-to-listen-on-audi library-at-the-hub
Author 10 books565 followers
It's not correct to say I finished this book; I just stopped reading. With one exception (The Innocent) I have put down every McEwan book I tried to read. I find his initial premises fascinating, but after 50 pages or so, I start to get bogged down in what I would call "over-writing," by which I mean writing for the author and not the reader. The story becomes relatively meaningless, and even the characters are subservient to the writer's phrase. I'm probably in a minority, but that's my take.
2 reviews
I always have the same reaction to McEwan's books: why does an author who can create passages about human disturbance and misery that ring so true insist upon adding elements into every novel that ring so false? Setting aside his formulaic plotting (barely plausible but not entirely ridiculous tragedy occurs, human relationships suffer - or don't - in the aftermath), why does McEwan throw in government ministers who wear short pants and freeze to death; or possibly-magical religious fanatics; or time-traveling, nearly aborted sons (although you gotta give him credit for spoofing himself in _Saturday_ for that misguided magical realism in _Child in Time_)?
McEwan is NOT a magical realist - his realism is too sharp and creditable while his magic is too clumsy and inane. So why disrupt wrenching, moving, difficult stories about the human condition with such silliness?
912 reviews928 followers
34th book of 2020.
Well, well, well. I don't like Ian McEwan's books, I only read them because my friend and I are determined to keep reading them so we can argue our hatred for him with well-founded knowledge and because I was half-hoping that at least one book of his would be good. This is my fifth McEwan and let's recap so far:
The Cement Garden - 2 stars.
The Innocent - 2 stars.
Amsterdam - 2 stars.
On Chesil Beach - 3 stars.
And here comes The Child in Time at 5 stars. What happened?
I'm quite pleased with myself that I liked this, loved this, that I am not just hating McEwan because I hate him - that I am genuinely trying and reading him with an open mind. And it finally paid off. This book was wonderful.
McEwan's writing has never worked for me. I find it like some wall on the page that I can't get through. The words just go into my mind and evaporate; they never make me feel anything at all. His scenes are stupid - especially one in Amsterdam, which still makes me angry. His characters are even worse - I don't think I've liked a single one. So usually, the writing is bad, the plots are bad, the characters are bad...
The plot here sounded entertaining, for once, on the blurb. Stephen Lewis', a children's author, daughter is kidnapped in a supermarket. This scene, which happens right near the start of the book got me hooked in. It is well written, sudden, shocking, and McEwan builds the tension with short sentences and good language (finally!). Stephen Lewis isn't a perfect character, but he isn't diabolical, I felt for him at least, I actually felt something (finally!). There are some fantastic characters in this (finally!), especially that of Charles. Some of the scenes were great too, a little surreal, but well-written and well executed (finally!). The ending was moving too (finally!).
Sort of spoilers here, not anything particularly ruining the story except maybe the second, but I'll hide all just in case, but these are the scenes that stood out for me:
This is a novel about, in essence, time and childhood. McEwan addresses both wonderfully, captured through scenes that were original and captivating and dialogue between characters who were, too, compelling.
If I were to recommend any McEwan book it would be none of the others I listed above and only this one. An admirable novel from a writer I dislike. I will say one last time: finally!
1001-list-2006-ed 20th-century lit-british
467 reviews1,394 followers
I was steered towards this—my first encounter with Ian McEwan—several years ago subsequent to discovering in an interview with troubled actor Tom Sizemore that he deemed this book one of the greatest novels he had ever read. Since at the time I was personally in a state of mind that allowed me to relate quite sympathetically with his particular struggle against demons, I impulsively purchased a copy of the book later that same day.
While I can't agree with him on the novel's relative merit, McEwan's look at both the struggles of a father who holds himself responsible for both the kidnapping (and presumed murder) of his young daughter and the subsequent fracturing of his marriage by the hammers of unreconciled guilt and unresolved grief, and those of his friend, a wealthy politician whose own childhood was abducted by a premature imposition of the demands and responsibilities of adulthood, is a haunting and sparse examination of the burdens of loss.
Stephen Lewis, the grieving father, listless and trudging through the days with the aid of the bottle, finds himself (somehow) visiting himself as a lad, reviewing happy days spent with his army father and secret-harboring mother—for in the course of his temporal eavesdropping he becomes aware of the shadow his mother is nursing. Conversely, Drake, his friend, straining under the demands of his position, reverts back to a fantasy childhood wherein all the carefree games he missed out on are recreated; he is humored in his increasingly inelastic delusions by his increasingly concerned wife. Two men, their lives crumbling, seeking solace in their childhood - one making the journey back in time through space, the other through the mind, all in an effort to rediscover those pivotal moments before childhood's end and draw them out, comb them, a deleterious regression to fantasy or a fantasy of penetrating to the essence of a cherished child's life, snatched away in one careless moment, that will forever be frozen in the mind by time's gelid stitching. The supporting cast becomes drawn into these movements as well: Drake's wife's conciliation will lead to estrangment; Lewis' estrangement from his wife will lead to a reconciliation.
I have read a few reviews that protested McEwan's sudden interposing of magical realism, the pat resolution; myself, I tend to grant the author a lot of magical leeway, and I thought the ending tied in with Stephen's awareness of his mother's then-painful decision, and that handful of sentences between sundered husband and wife that eased a tremendous accumulation of guilt. McEwan—informed by his ugly real life custody battle with his ex-wife—alternately takes a detached and elegiac tone, and the novel has moments (especially when Stephen mistakes another man's daughter for his own lost child) that are very moving. A worthwhile read, and a fine introduction to this English author's body of work.
Author 11 books1,174 followers
This was sublime writing that served as an antidote to a couple of books I’ve read recently which had technical problems. It jumps around time, the writing is fine, the narrative grips your heart and moves; there’s clarity even as there is metaphor and no neat story, and there is absolutely no showing off.
The Child in Time is my tenth Ian McEwan book, and the only straight-forward aspect here is the title. Of the books that I’ve read, this is the most daring. A child is stolen. A child/man dies. There is a battle between adult and child desires. A child is born. There is mergence. And for all of this, time is a mutable mysterious thing. I won’t try to analyze this; that’s a task for each reader. But I will say there is a lot to think and feel about—way more than I can write in a quick review immediately after closing the last page.
679 reviews243 followers
Este livro foi a minha estreia com o autor pois a constante emissão de sinais do universo assim o exigiu! :D Foi uma boa leitura pois a companheira dos livros é excelente -obrigada, Cristina! Já a história deixou muito a desejar. Houve capítulos que apreciei, a relação do Stephen com a Julie e as recordações dos pais de Stephen. Já os outros pareceram-me saídos do nada e até no universo da distopia, como se fosse uma realidade alternativa.
2,113 reviews281 followers
Stephen Lewis, the successful writer of a children's book, has had his life fall apart after the disappearance of his three-year-old daughter. His wife has left him and he faces the daily self-examination of what is left of his life as he goes through the stages of grief. 'More than two years on and still stuck, still trapped in the dark, enfolded with his loss, shaped by it, lost to the ordinary currents of feeling that moved far above him and belonged exclusively to other people.'
Just who is 'the child in time?' Is it the daughter who will always remain three years old in her parents' minds/memories? Is it Stephen himself who is stuck in his grief, unable to move on? Is it his friend, Charles Darke, who longs 'to escape from time, from appointments, schedules, deadlines' and be like a child again?
McEwan plays with time in this novel--having it slow down on some occasions; in another, Stephen has an experience 'out of time.' Stephen's mother speaks of the timelessness of some long-ago memories which make them seem as fresh as the present moment. The scientific theories of time are explained by a physicist. Stephen wonders does the passage of time make one a grown up?
The story does bog down in a few spots but hold on, things get better and the story ends on a hopeful note. I have read several of McEwan's books and always find my patience is rewarded. His writing is so exquisite!
#book-vipers-book-hunter: CHILD
1001-books-to-read-before-you-die 2017-reads book-vipers-book-hunter
522 reviews639 followers
During the reading of this book I was in two-minds for most of it.
Child in Time by Ian McEwan is another multi-layered story and it has played on my mind since completion.
The simple story is about the abduction of a little girl called Kate, taken in a supermarket and its massive impact on her two parents – Stephen and Julie. Both parents deal with this loss in very different ways, which very much illustrates the point that grief is very much a solo journey. Stephen is the character we follow more closely, he is a writer and participates on a UK Government Committee about child literacy, we get to know his friends and we witness his solitary downward spiral into the dark recesses of the heaviest of grieving processes.
Now this theme sounds like there’s enough to chew on, but true to form McEwen takes us on a journey touching on other topics such as quantum physics, time, psychology, literature theory amongst others. McEwen doesn’t just touch on these and other topics he deep dives, and goes into great detail. This detail was so great, at times I though it detracted from the main story – about Stephen and Julie – and found myself wondering where it was all heading. But in true McEwen form, there is reason behind his work, I should have known he doesn’t just put in content for the fun of it.
However, it all seemed to make sense once finished. But there is a lot to think about. Sure, grief is a major topic, but the theme of time (as stated in the title) comes to the fore, but maybe not in the way the reader may think. There are several ways this is weaved into this story, one of the threads was totally unexpected. Yes, the relativity and constancy of time comes through very strong.
Don’t rush this one, no mad dash to the end – I really should have slowed down a bit reading this one. I will certainly re-read this book and saviour it, as there is so much here. This is my third McEwen book and he is rapidly becoming my favourite. But that may be the recency effect talking, so I think I’ll take a breath, have a coffee, a ginger nut and ponder a bit longer.
4 Stars ……..It’s really 4.5 but I want room to move when I re-read it.
mcewen modern-fiction science-fiction
3,941 reviews3,259 followers
(3.5) This is the second-earliest of the 12 McEwan books I’ve read. It won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction (now the Costa Novel Award) in 1987. It’s something of a bizarre jumble (from the protagonist’s hobbies of Arabic and tennis lessons plus drinking onwards), yet everything clusters around the title’s announced themes of children and time.
Stephen Lewis’s three-year-old daughter, Kate, was abducted from a supermarket three years ago. The incident is recalled early in the book, as if the remainder will be about solving the mystery of what happened to Kate. But such is not the case. Her disappearance is an unalterable fact of Stephen’s life that drove him and his wife apart, but apart from one excruciating scene later in the book when he mistakes a little girl on a school playground for Kate and interrogates the principal about her, the missing child is just subtext.
Instead, the tokens of childhood are political and fanciful. Stephen, a writer whose novels accidentally got categorized as children’s books, is on a government committee producing a report on childcare. On a visit to Suffolk, he learns that his publisher, Charles Darke, who later became an MP, has reverted to childhood, wearing shorts and serving lemonade up in a treehouse. Meanwhile, Charles’s wife, Thelma, is a physicist researching the nature of time. For Charles, returning to childhood is a way of recapturing timelessness. There’s also an odd shared memory that Stephen and his mother had four decades apart: Stephen is sure he sees younger versions of his parents at the Bell pub; later, he hears from his mother about the day she and his father stopped at a pub during a bike ride and she told him she was pregnant. He was steering her towards an abortion, but she saw a face outside the window and knew it was her future son’s. Even tiny details add to the time theme, like Stephen’s parents meeting when his father returned a defective clock to the department store where his mother worked.
This is McEwan, so you know there’s going to be at least one contrived but very funny scene. Here that comes in Chapter 5, when Stephen is behind a flipped lorry and goes to help the driver. He agrees to take down a series of (increasingly outrageous) dictated letters but gets exasperated at about the same time it becomes clear the young man is not approaching death. Instead, he helps him out of the cab and they celebrate by drinking two bottles of champagne. This doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the rest of the book, but is the scene I’m most likely to remember.
Other noteworthy elements: Stephen has a couple of run-ins with the Prime Minister; though this is clearly Margaret Thatcher, McEwan takes pains to neither name nor so much as reveal the gender of the PM. Homeless people and gypsies show up multiple times, making Stephen uncomfortable but also drawing his attention. I couldn’t decide if this was a political point about Thatcher’s influence, or whether the homeless were additional stand-ins for children in a paternalistic society, representing vulnerability and (misplaced) trust.
This is a book club read for our third monthly Zoom meeting. While it’s a strange and not entirely successful book, I think it will give us a lot to talk about: the good and bad aspects of reverting to childhood, whether it matters if Kate ever comes back, the caginess about Thatcher, and so on.
free-other mental-health parenting-or-not
825 reviews68 followers
Este libro es imperfecto, roto de origen, con partes intensas, otras soporíferas, algunas más extrañas, algo de redención y misticismo, pero esta mezcla logra entregar una narración que te va seduciendo y hace que te olvides de las partes malas y sólo perdure lo bueno, casi como los recuerdos o el pasado, que se van magnificando conforme se hacen más lejanos.
Stephen es un escritor de cuentos infantiles con una vida hecha, una esposa artista, una hija de 3 años adorable, un día la vida se rompe en miles de pedazos sin posibilidad de regresión.
Stephen tiene un amigo llamado Michael que ha destacado en la profesión que emprende, su última trabajo es de asesor político muy cercano al primer ministro, Michael tiene una esposa que es psicóloga y juntos forman una pareja sin igual.
Stephen esta roto cuando empieza su relato, de manera mecánica acude a un comité en el cual participa para discutir sobre leyes que puedan beneficiar a la niñez, de vez en cuando escribe pero lo hace más para justificarse que por tener un interés verdadero.
Hay mucho dolor palpable en los personajes y no lo tienen que decir o demostrar, se percibe en el ambiente, en las conversaciones, en los comportamientos, parece un sopor que ha inundado la vida y parece no tener fin.
En algún momento Stephen se enfrenta a algo que parece un espejismo, que lo hace desbordarse y regodearse en su dolor y sin quererlo este quiebre lo devuelve a la vida.
En esta nueva vida Stephen tiene que recorrer todavía un camino de obstáculos, golpes, y pérdidas pero sobre todo deberá llegar al fondo de su miseria y despertar al hecho que la vida nunca volverá a ser la misma, que lo perdido, perdido esta, y que deberá rehacerse e inventarse un nuevo yo que le permita crear algo nuevo, nunca algo mejor que lo que tenia, pero si algo que le de esperanza.
218 reviews57 followers
Un po' indecifrabile questo romanzo di McEwan, scritto a suo dire "con la pancia". Per alcuni tratti mi è sembrato un romanzo un po' datato, che non ha saputo perforare l'involucro del suo tempo; colpevole quella pur leggera nuance distopica che ha voluto conferire a una Inghilterra post-thatcheriana precariamente verosimile. D'altro canto la sua riflessione romanzata sul "bambino nel tempo" offre spunti notevoli, a partire proprio da quel ridicolo simposio pedagogico che tenta goffamente di imbrigliare con i suoi assunti la libera bellezza dell'infanzia. L'episodio centrale, quello che trasmette l'immancabile angosciosità dei suoi scritti, è la sparizione della figlioletta del protagonista in un banalissimo momento di disattenzione; da questo terrificante strappo alla normalità, McEwan ci accompagna nei percorsi paralleli del protagonista Stephen e - con più discrezione - di sua moglie, due strade che poi ritroveranno un inatteso punto di ricongiungimento. Seguiamo soprattutto gli sconquassi esistenziali dello scrittore di libri per l'infanzia Stephen Lewis, il suo difficilissimo percorso di accettazione di questa agghiacciante separazione; e nel senso di questo incerto vagare, di una disperazione silenziosa e presente, incrocerà la lucida follia dell'amico Charles, affetto da una bizzarra sindrome di Peter Pan che lo porta ad arrampicarsi sugli alberi rivivendo una infanzia posticcia, preferendo la fionda alle premesse di una folgorante carriera politica.
Romanzo scompattato, di cui onestamente si fatica a credere che esista un autentico collante; pur nella sua sperimentalità, emerge il grande talento naturale di questo scrittore britannico, il suo stile limpido e la sua incredibile abilità nel colpire allo stomaco il lettore per poi accompagnarlo, provato e dolente, attraverso i tortuosi sentieri della convalescenza.
69 reviews580 followers
Terzo libro che leggo di questo autore e, anche questa volta, sono stata catturata dalla sua bravura.
Questa è una storia di dolore, perdita e lutto resa ancora più tragica dal fatto che non parliamo di morte vera e propria ma di scomparsa. Stephan infatti è un famoso autore di libri per bambini quando, in una normale giornata passata al supermercato, perde la figlia Kate.
Rapita? Uccisa? Abusata? O semplicemente persa? Queste sono le idee che sorgono nella mente di Stephen e che lo tormenteranno per tutta la sua vita, anche a distanza di anni dalla scomparsa della figlia.
Stephan la cerca, la vede nei volti delle altre bambine, ma più passa il tempo e più questa sfrenata ricerca si abbatte come un' ossessione sulla vita di Stephan e di sua moglie.
Attraverso la straordinaria prosa di McEwan viviamo insieme al protagonista tutte le fasi che susseguono questo tragico evento, l'incredulità, la rabbia, la ricerca, il dolore e infine l'elaborazione della perdita, tracciando un percorso di ascesa e infine di rinascita.
2,036 reviews1,503 followers
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.)
2012-read fantasy not-my-cup-of-tea
337 reviews95 followers
There is something un-McEwanesque afoot, especially in the ending …
Not that there isn’t the tension and horror you expect from McEwan in this novel that’s set some time in the near future of the late eighties, but looking back some three years as well (a period that’s now 30 years ago, I have to keep reminding myself).
A brilliant first chapter captures the unfolding horror of three-year-old Kate’s abduction from a routine supermarket trip with her father, the noted children’s writer Stephen Lewis: the surreal time-distorting re-enactment that Stephen goes through repeatedly; his obsessive neighbourhood-patrolling to find her; his paralysis of denial that’s now into its third year; his wife Julie’s totally different way of attempting to cope with their daughter’s disappearance, that leads inevitably to their separation. All this is related with the usual McEwan finesse that that makes for breathtaking reading.
And although the subsequent chapters can’t quite match that perfection of timing and everything else, I love this work because, after a year or so, when Stephen and Julie have separately come to terms with their grief, a reconciliation occurs: it’s McEwan writing about love without a macabre or excruciatingly sad ending, and I am so glad to have read this.
On its own this would have been a shortish novella, but the story brings in a number of related themes connected with childhood and perceptions of time. Central is Stephen seconded on to a government committee on childcare; for much of the time it’s his only relief from obsessive thinking, and its time-dilating dullness contrasts with the apparent compression of time that McEwan works into a couple of incidents.
In one, Stephen thinks he sees Kate in a local school playground and pursues her into the school with an inevitable excruciating let-down; in another, while driving he has a near-miss with a crashed van where a couple of seconds morph into slow-motion avoidance. (This last episode also has – incongruously - a farcical encounter with the van driver who dictates what he thinks are his final words to Stephen)
Stephen’s friend, mentor and publisher Charles Darke also has a significant role, and much of the story is taken up with his regression into childhood under the guise of living out a dream of returning to some elemental state, the paradisical childhood he never had.
There is also a time-warping incident where Stephen hallucinates or dreams about a near-encounter with his parents before he was born. When Stephen relates this to his mother, she recalls the occasion (she had been pregnant at the time) and says she remembers seeing a boy where Stephen had been standing, who, she was certain, was her future son. Charles’s wife, a theoretical physicist, attempts to make sense of their experience by explaining how quantum physics and relativity deal with time and space - which he tunes out, of course. A foray by McEwan into Magical Realism?
Quite apart from all that, there’s McEwan’s satirical view of life under the Thatcher Tories – in addition to pointed scenes in the childcare committee’s interminable meetings, there are licensed beggars everywhere with government-issue begging bowls (a huge saving on welfare costs). The prime minister in fact makes several appearances in the story as Charles’s sometime close friend and mentor (Charles had been an MP for a few years before resigning abruptly). McEwan cleverly makes the PM’s identity and even gender indeterminate, however.
It's all a bit of a grab-bag of incidents. (quite the oddest to me, was a train journey from Charles’s house in the country just two hours from London. For some reason, McEwan has Stephen catching a sleeper from Scotland arriving at this little halt at an impossible time in the early morning. Was this a test to see how alert we were, or did McEwan slip up - perish the thought!)
Or was this just more magical realism grafted on to McEwan's usual hyper-realism?
Whatever, I didn’t think the expositions on time were particularly successful or added much to Stephen and Julie’s journey. But for all that, it was an excellent read.
About the movie
The 2017 Benedict Cumberbatch film, which I watched just after reading this, was also excellent and stuck closely to the spirit of the book (with some omissions of course, and re-cast into the present). I thought both the school playground and the Charles Darke episodes were in fact handled rather better - Charles discusses his predicament with Stephen in a way that didn’t happen in the book - and the only thing I found a bit surprising was that the PM was a much younger man, when in the book he/she was about 65, Margaret Thatcher’s age at the time. I wonder, were they suggesting a David Cameron figure instead?
Author 12 books288 followers
An internal novel that plays on its title: the search for childhood lost or to be yet found, and time moving back and forth in waves, weaving past and present into one tapestry.
In typical McEwan tradition, the novel hovers around a singular event - protagonist Stephen loses his three year old daughter in a supermarket -an event that send his marriage and personal life into a dark spiral. As Stephen tries to grapple with his loss and revisits his own lost childhood, his friend and one-time publisher, Charles, gives up the good life of a successful businessman and politician to retreat into the woods in Suffolk and play on tree houses, even visiting prostitutes to have himself spanked by matronly whores.
Through their retreat into the past, both discover an immutable truth, which is the moral of the novel: redemption lies in creating,in moving forward, not in retreating.
I found the writing was very narrative-focussed and the constant weaving of past and present put me on edge, because I never knew when I was going to be in the past vs. the present vs. somewhere in between. Yet, the prose is elegant and McEwan has the knack of bringing out mood, character and setting in a single complex sentence.
There were little asides on the fate of the writer which interested me: writing is deemed a social act in a public medium; writing extends the private life. Charles and Stephen embody this philosophy: the former as the author of a "how to" manual on the raising of children sponsored by none other than the prime minister who has a secret sexual interest in his protégé, and the latter as an author of children's books.
And yet many of the elements of the "novel" were missing: Charles' sexual deviancies were "told" to us by his wife Thelma, rather than "shown" to us in his behaviour; the parliamentary committee on children’s issues goes into speeches and moralizing to indicate their stance on the subject they were supposed to address; and Stephen, our narrator, is constantly in his head trying to sort out one scene in his past from another - if he was lost, so was I at times.
Having written these kinds of books in the earlier part of his career, I am glad that McEwan is now moving into telling us better stories, with the accent on "story", not "head games."
573 reviews126 followers
«Χαμένο παιδί»
Η επαφή με τον συγκεκριμένο συγγραφέα δεν πήγε πολύ καλά.
Είχα υψηλές προσδοκίες γι’ αυτό το ανάγνωσμα κ τελικά με άφησε λίγο παγωμένη.
Ένα μίγμα με μια ελάχιστη δόση αστυνομικού- μυστηρίου κ ψυχογραφήματος - ψυχανάλυσης.
Οφείλω να αναγνωρίσω πως τους ήρωες τους γνωρίζεις. Σου αποκαλύπτονται πολλές πτυχές της ζωής τους. Παρ’ όλα αυτά περιμένεις μια μεγαλύτερη αγωνία.
Ο χωροχρόνος δεσπόζει σε ολόκληρο το ανάγνωσμα κ ο αναγνώστης αναλαμβάνει ρόλο ψυχαναλυτή προσπαθώντας να έρθει σε επαφή με γεγονότα που στιγμάτισαν τους πρωταγωνιστές, να αξιολογήσει επιλογές κ αποφάσεις ώστε στο τέλος να τον καταλάβει. Να συνειδητοποιήσει πως η απώλεια στον άνθρωπο είναι ο μεγαλύτερος του φόβος κ πως είναι αναγκασμένος να τον αντιμετωπίσει.
Author 3 books21 followers
In what might be Ian McEwan’s least-read, but perhaps best novel, The Child In Time, a children’s book author, Stephen, must come to terms with his three-year old daughter’s abduction and, presumably, her death. Complicating this heart-breaking situation is Stephen’s wife Julie, who has hermited herself away in the countryside, and the fascinating and surreal parallel stories of Stephen’s own childhood, and that of his best friends—his publisher and his wife, a physicist. “The child in time” is not merely a title or a play on words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, and how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of others. Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, this is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style (Atonement, Saturday).
674 reviews100 followers
"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."
'The Child in Time,' is set in 1980's London and society and this book seems pretty bleak. A fight between a Soviet and an American athlete at the recent Olympics has nearly escalated into nuclear war; although she is never named it is pretty obvious that Margaret Thatcher is Britain's Prime Minister and her Government has undertaken all sorts of cutbacks, home-owners have lost touch with their neighbours living separate lives whilst licensed beggars roam the streets of London.
The book opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, one morning, decides to let his wife have a lie in and takes his 3-year-old daughter, Kate, with him to the supermarket, while waiting in the check-out line, she suddenly disappears - apparently kidnapped by a stranger. Despite extensive searches, posters and flyers she isn't found. Whilst Stephen roams the streets in search for Kate, his wife, Julie, stays at home, retreating further and further into her private grief. Lost in their own despair the couple start to drift apart; and as the weeks turn into months, their marriage falls apart. Julie moves to an isolated cottage in the countryside whilst Stephen spends his days watching television and daydreaming.
Through a series of flashbacks, including in to his own childhood, the reader cannot but help feeling a great deal of compassion for Stephen and his shifting emotions but in truth he isn't a particularly likeable character. Royalty payments from his books means that Stephen doesn't have to go out to work and virtually the only time that he leaves his flat is to attend Westminster committee meetings on the Official on Child Care where he spends his time daydreaming and barely participating. When one day after mistaking a little girl in a school-yard for Kate, Stephen realises that his life is spinning out of control, and he takes steps to create a new routine for himself.
Alongside Stephen's own struggles his friend Charles Darke is also slowing slipping into madness, unable to reconcile his childish nature and his adult responsibilities. This serves to mirror Stephen's own precarious mental state. Just as Kate's disappearance provides a terrible illustration of the loss of innocence so Charles's mental decline is a heavy-handed metaphor for Stephen's own inability to retrieve his youth. Stephen tries to help Charles's wife, Thelma, but is equally ineffectual there as well.
The absurd Committee meetings and Stephen's encounters with the Prime Minister add a little light relief to what is a largely depressing storyline. Throughout the book there are a series of set piece elements mainly centred around loss, some of which worked whereas some were less effective IMHO. I have read several of McEwan's books in the past and been generally disappointed with them but this one despite its rather depressing subject matter I found compulsive reading and hard to put down.