The Child in Time

"The Child in Time" (1987) is a novel by Ian McEwan. It won the Whitbread Novel Award for that year. It concerns Stephen, an author of children's books, and his wife two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate.

Plot

The book is set in a dystopian near future at the end of the twentieth Century, in a continuation of the Thatcher government (the book was written in 1987).

Stephen Lewis is, by his own admission, an accidental author of children's books. One Saturday, on a routine visit to the supermarket, in a concentration lapse, he loses his only daughter, Kate. The only purpose in his life is that he is a member of a committee on childcare. Otherwise he spends his days lying on the sofa drinking scotch and watching mindless TV programmes. His wife, Julie, has become a recluse, and he visits her very rarely. He has a close friend, Charles Darke, who published his first novel and who is now a junior Minister in the Cabinet, and the Prime Minister's favourite. His wife, Thelma, is a quantum physicist. She engages Stephen with her outlandish theories on time and space. However, his friends lives are about to change irrevocably in a way he cannot understand, and he is a helpless bystander.

Eventually Stephen experiences a strange event that he cannot explain: he sees his parents as a young couple in a pub, before they marry. The book also deals with his grief and eventually his painful acceptance of losing his child.

Themes

The book deals with the theory that time is relative, and that time can be fluid and unstructured. In one respect it could be viewed as a time travelling story. At the very core of the novel is the "child in time" — Stephen himself — appearing to his mother as a child's face at a window, which makes her decide to keep the child — him — rather than to abort.It also explores the way both Stephen's and Julie's lives disintegrate after Kate's disappearance, and how an unexpected event at the very end of the book may bring them back together.

The novel shows connection between the lead character Stephen and Ian McEwan himself, as the author was fighting for the custody of his children after divorcing his wife at around this time.

External links

* [http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/ian-mcewan/child-in-time.htm Fantastic Fiction]
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385497527 Random House page]
* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1282 Essay] at [http://www.litencyc.com/index.php The Literary Encyclopedia]