The Child in Time

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Now a major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch

'Only Ian McEwan could write about loss with such telling honesty' Benedict Cumberbatch

On a routine trip to the supermarket with his daughter one Saturday morning, Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, turns his back momentarily. When he looks around again, his child is gone. In a single moment, everything is changed. The kidnapping has a devastating effect on Stephen's life and marriage. Memories and the present become inseparable - as Stephen gets lost in daydreams of the past - and time bends back on itself, dragging Stephen's own childhood back into the present.

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"...and for those parents, for too many years misguided by pallid relativism of self-appointed child-care experts..." - The Authorized Child-Care Handbook, Her Majesty's Stationery Office Subsidizing public transport had long been associated in the minds of both government and the majority of its public with the denial of individual liberty.  The various services collapsed twice a day at rush hour when it was quicker, Stephen found, to walk from his flat at Whitehall than to take a taxi.  It was late May, barely nine-thirty, and already the temperature was nudging the eighties.  He strode to Vauxhall Bridge past double and treble files of trapped, throbbing cars, each with its solitary driver.  In tone the pursuit of liberty was more resigned than passionate.  Ringed fingers drummed patiently on the sill of a hot tin roof, white-shirted elbows poked through rolled-down windows.  There were newspapers spread over steering wheels.  Stephen stepped quickly through the crowds, through layers of car radio blather--jingles, high-energy breakfast DJs, news flashes, traffic "alerts."  Those drivers not reading listened stolidly.  The steady forward press of the pavement crowds must have conveyed to them a sense of relative motion, of drifting slowly backwards. Jigging and weaving to overtake, Stephen remained as always, though barely consciously, on the watch for children, for a five-year-old girl.  It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken.  This was a disposition, the outline experience had stenciled on character.  It was not principally a search, though it had once been an obsessive hunt, and for a long time too.  Two years on, only vestiges of that remained; now it was a longing, a dry hunger.  There was a biological clock, dispassionate in its unstoppability, which let his daughter go on growing, extended and complicated her simple vocabulary, made her stronger, her movements surer.  The clock, sinewy like a heart, kept faith with an unceasing conditional: she would be drawing, she would be starting to read, she would be losing a milk tooth.  She would be familiar, taken for granted.  It seemed as though the proliferating instances might wear down this conditional, the frail, semiopaque screen whose fine tissues of time and chance separated her from him; she is home from school and tired, her tooth is under the pillow, she is looking for her daddy. Any five-year-old girl --though boys would do -- gave substance to her continued existence.  In shops, past playgrounds, at the houses of friends, he could not fail to watch out for Kate in other children, or ignore them in the slow changes, the accruing competences, or fail to feel the untapped potency of weeks and months, the time that should have been hers.  Kate's growing up had become the essence of time itself.  Her phantom growth, the product of an obsessive sorrow, was not only inevitable -- nothing could stop the sinewy clock -- but necessary.  Without the fantasy of her continued existence he was lost, time would stop.  He was the father of an invisible child. But here on Millbank there were only ex-children shuffling to work.  Further up, just before Parliament or Whitehall or within sight of the square.  But a few were taking advantage of the confluence of commuter routes.  He saw their bright badges from a couple of hundred yards away.  This was their weather, and they looked cocky with their freedom.  The wage-earners had to give way.  A dozen beggars were working both sides of the street, moving towards him steadily against the surge.  It was a child Stephen was watching now, not a five-year-old, but a skinny prepubescent.  She had registered him at some distance.  She walked slowly, somnambulantly, the regulation black bowl extended.  The office workers parted and converged about her.  Her eyes were fixed on Stephen as she came.  He felt the usual ambivalence.  To give money ensured the success of the government program.  Not to give involved some determined facing-away from private distress.  There was no way out.  The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right.  These days he left the matte to chance.  If he had small change in his pocket, he gave it.  If not, he gave nothing.  He never handed out banknotes. The girl was brown-skinned from sunny days on the street.  She wore a grubby yellow cotton frock and her hair was severely cropped.  Perhaps she had been deloused.  As he distance closed he saw she was pretty, impish and freckled with a pointed chin.  She was no more than twenty feet away when she ran forward and took from the pavement a lump of still glistening chewing gum.  She popped it in her mouth and began to chew.  The little head tilted back defiantly as she looked again in his direction. Then she was before him, the standard-issue bowl held out before her.  She had chosen him minutes ago, it was a trick they had.  Appalled, he had reached into his back pocket for a five-pound note.  She looked on with neutral expression as he set it down on top of the coins. As soon as his hand was clear, the girl picked the note out, rolled it tight into her fist, and said, "Fuck you, mister."  She was edging round him. Stephen put his hand on the hard, narrow shoulder and gripped.  "What was that you said?" The girl turned and pulled away. The eyes had shrunk, the voice was reedy. "I said, Fank you, mister."  She was out of reach when she added, "Rich creep!" Stephen showed empty palms in mild rebuke.  He smiled without parting his lips to convey his immunity to the insult.  But the kid had resumed her steady, sleepwalker's step along the street.  He watched her for a full minute before he lost her in the crowd.  She did not glance back. Excerpted from The Child in Time by Ian McEwan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

There are actually several childen in McEwan's new novel: Stephen Lewis's kidnapped daughter; the barefoot boy his friend Charles tries (with fatal results) to become; the hypothetical child under study by the Official Commission on Child Care, on one of whose subcommittees Stephen sits. And there are several fictional modes at work, ranging from a realistic account of wrenching personal loss to a satire on bureaucracy. Unfortunately these varying aspects undercut rather than reinforce one another, and the result is a muddle. English writer McEwan made his name with the scarifying stories in First Love, Last Rites ( LJ 6/15/75). Despite a happy ending, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that here he's working in an uncongenial genre. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A sense of loss pervades this fine, provocative new novel by the author of The Comfort of Strangers. The protagonist, Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, is introduced to us in a scene more frightening than any from a horror novel: while he is shopping with Kate, his three-year-old daughter, the child is kidnapped. Stephen's mounting terror as he combs the store for Katetrying in vain to recall the face of the dark-clad stranger he glimpsed behind themis palpable. As the story moves forward, it focuses not only on Stephen's search for his daughter, but also on his attempts to come to terms with his loss and the likely collapse of his marriage to Julie, a musician. Woven through the narrative is a subplot that deals with childhood and loss of a different sort. It is the innocence of youth that Stephen's friend and former editor, Charles Darke, longs for and ultimately recaptures at a terrible price. This is a beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel. First serial to Esquire. (September 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Stephen Lewis' three-year-old daughter is snatched from a supermarket. Following several months of frantic searching, Stephen, a British writer of children's books, breaks down. His wife leaves him, and his single activity is his attendance at the weekly meetings of a subcommittee of the Official Commission on Child Care. But this is not really a missing-child novel. It is more about the relationship between childhood and adulthood and our search for the child in us all. This theme is manifest in the absurd and ultimately useless work of the commission, in a vision Stephen has of his parents before their marriage, and in the demise of Stephen's best friend a public figure within whom the adult side and the child side are at war. Beautifully written, this novel is at once sad, wryly humorous, and full of hope. McEwan also wrote The Comfort of Strangers (Booklist 77:1292 Je 1 81) and The Cement Garden (75:27 S 1 78). MEQ. [OCLC] 87-8603

Kirkus Book Review

With none of his previous delight in things macabre, McEwan sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time, and ends up with a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication--his most expansive and passionate fiction to date. The time of the novel is an era not so unlike our own; the licensed beggars working the London streets are a product of post-Thatcher extremism--a period of even further privatization and more brutal self-interest. Stephen Lewis, once a countercultural type, then a successful children's book author, now sleepwalks through the neo-Hobbesian landscape. Having had his three-year, old daughter stolen in the supermarket, he's also lost his wife, Julie, a violinist who shares a ""perverse collusion in unhappiness"" with her guilt-ridden spouse. The only interruption in his routine of booze and the boob-tube is his weekly committee meetings at Whitehall on Reading and Writing subcommittee of the Official Commission on Child Care. Stephen's friend and former publisher, Charles Drake, a self-made millionaire and rightist M.P., is being groomed for greater things by the P.M. But after appointing Stephen to the Commission, Charles abandons politics in pursuit of the childhood he never had. While his wife, a former professor, writes about the physics of time, Charles--now ""completely mad""--retreats into his life-threatening treehouse. Stephen meanwhile wanders in and out of time, reliving that tragic day at the market, recalling his own childhood as an RAF brat, and experiencing in the present a number of infantilizing episodes. Once he realizes, though, that ""all the sorrow. . .had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable,"" he recovers from his political quiescence, his creative doldrums, and, most importantly, the numbness which delayed mourning. With spiritual rebirth comes a literal birth--Julie and Stephen's, and McEwan's, quiet affirmation of life. Though intensely cinematic, this subtle and complex novel would require a director of like narrative daring and imaginative genius. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.