Rebecca's review of The Child in Time (original) (raw)

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Rebecca's Reviews > The Child in Time

The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

The Child in Time
by

5875398

(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.

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Reading Progress

May 8, 2020 –Started Reading

May 14, 2020 –Finished Reading

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