The Child in Time

McEwan does it again. "A Child in Time" is a provocative, suspensful tale about the aftermath of a loving couple's four year old daughter being abducted from under the father's nose. McEwan explores the various stages of post-tragedy existance for father and mother, whose reaction and self-healing process take various paths and by-ways before ultimate resolution. A thoughtful read with which parents and non-parents will empathize.

I've read lots of Mr. McEwan's work, and every other novel is brilliant. Unfortunately, this is the Other novel. Atonement and Enduring Love were wonderful, Saturday a disappointment, and Amsterdam a disaster. This is the worst yet. The plot centers around the kidnapping of the main character's young daughter and his reaction to the tragedy. There is no significant character development, a gratuitous Prime Minister, a suicide sweetly explained away by the deceased's wife, and pages of rambling, seemingly pointless prose. There is a certain redemption in the last few pages, but that does not offset the pain of the middle part. Try one of his other works instead.

The two key themes of A Child in Time are contained in the title, which is a kind of a pun on the baby that arrives in time to save the marriage. There is the stolen child lost in time, Kate; Steven tries to keep her in time, to give her imaginary growth, but fails. Julie has to learn to allow her to be lost to a past time yet still loved in present time. There is the child out of time - Steven's revisiting his own former self in some supernatural experience. There is the fictional child of his novels, children forever children in the constructed world that fiction allows. And there is the adult who wants to return to the naivety and lack of responsibility of childhood, and actually attempts a real regression to that level. His attempt is catastrophic. The character Charles raises the issue of time quite early in the novel, when he comments that to children, there is no time; their world is somehow played out with little awareness of the passing of time or of a real future. The comment: "In every child there is a hidden adult and in every adult there is a hidden child", plays with changes in time's forward arrow. Charles's desire to return to the innocence and insouciance of childhood, we are told by Thelma, is a widespread problem amongst adults; it is accentuated as pathology in Charles.
The novel, as most of McEwan's novels, travels to and fro in time with back flashes interspersing the narrative of the present, and a future never out of sight. Although the novel returns in time, and although Steven's memory does also, McEwan constantly reminds us that our present is the result of past decisions, past important moments of choice that cannot be retrieved or extirpated. Time travels on, and the missing Kate has to find her own place in that arrow of time in a way that will allow the parents to move on without her, yet with loving memories of her.
Within this thematic, there are some lovely moments: I think it the only work of McEwan that has brought me to actual tears. But the tears are momentary. It has none of the poignancy of On Chesil Beach, or the enduring sense of loss or tragedy - but then, it is not a tragedy, so that is hardly surprising. The style is recognisably and wonderfully McEwan even while it lacks the more refined and subtle skills he has at his disposal today (the original copyright is 1987). Part of his lack of skill is in his methodology - his actual story telling. He is not able, as he is now, to get as expertly inside his characters and quarry their psychological depths.
For me, his greatest failure centred on the actual stealing of Kate. I find it barely credible. I also find the failure to follow the psyches or the conversations of the couple at this time to be frustrating. He can't quite deal with the magnitude of his own plot at this point, and steps too far back from both action and characters for me. There are unexplained gaps in plot, jumps in logic, presumptions and omissions that stretch the reader's belief.
I would not recommend it to anyone as their first McEwan, and I would certainly not recommend it to anyone as a marvel in its own right. Neither would I criticise it as a failed attempt. I would love to see what the more mature McEwan could do today with the same theme, but even the less experienced version indicates enormous promise, and is a pleasure to read. The disappointment occurs because we now know he can do better.

This is the eighth book of McEwan's that I have read, and it was not among my favorites. This was probably McEwan's most introspective novel so far, but I found myself getting bored with Stephen's thoughts. I enjoyed the plotline involving the disappearance of his daughter and how that tragedy affected his relationship with his wife. I liked his reflection on how he became a children's writer, but I thought the whole relationship with his publisher Charles and his wife a bit strange. Charles' wife's ramblings about Time were uninteresting, as was Stephen's work with the committee. I typically fly through McEwan, but certain parts of this one just had me stuck.

While the title has many levels aside from Stephen's missing daughter, there were layers that I thought seemed irrelevant. If you prefer the more introspective McEwan novels, like Saturday, then you'd enjoy The Child in Time. This did not have the shock value of The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers, or the epic novelty that made Atonement a huge success, but it's still McEwan through and through.

McEwan manages to take the theme of a kidnapped child and turn it into a story of courage, love, and hope, without dredging it in sentimentality and triteness. Not as immersed in irony as is ON CHESIL BEACH, it nevertheless manages to leave a lasting impression both as a story and a well-written novel.