Customer Reviews
Formed in infancy - By: Philip Spires, 31 Aug 2010 
Stephen Lawes appears to be pretty well-heeled. His successes seem remarkable. He is a successful writer of children's books. He is acquainted with Charles Darke, who is apparently being groomed for a ministerial positionin government. Via this connection, Stephen also sits on a Whitehall committee to examine policy options on childhood, children, education & related issues. He himself also seems to have the prime minister's ear. He has a wife, Julie, who loves him & beautiful little three-year-old daughter, Kate, whom he worships.
But then one day Kate is no longer there. On a trip to the shops with her father, there are events that take her out of her parents' lives. In her absence, Stephen continues to worship her, to see her walking along the street,in a school playground, perhaps everywhere he tries to look. Meanwhile life goes on, but for Stephen aspects of it begin to disintegrate. The child has stopped his time.
There follows,in Ian McEwan's novel, The Child In Time, an examination of childhood. In various guises, this biologically-fixed but socially-defined state is seen to influence & control the lives of the book's characters. The fact that children are sexually & physically immature human beings whose characteristics are still developing seems pretty immutable. But what is it that demands they should eat special foods from special menus? Is it essential that the experience of childhood should be always multi-coloured, perhaps as a preparation for the unending greyness of adulthood? And why,in the twenty-first century is it deemed that children should not work, whenin the nineteenth it was considered desirable, perhaps even essential for everyone's greater well-being?
If we are stressedin our daily lives, how much of our ability to cope, or not cope, stems from our ability to re-invent a child's curiosity & enthusiasm, not to mention naiveté? And is this state also perhaps a place of protecting retreat? And how exactly did we manage to create this space?
The Child In Time examines several strands of thought relating to infancy, childhood & dependency via the assumptions & reactions of adults. It is a novel with multiple parallel strands, more of a meditation on a theme than a focused, linear progression. It always plays with its ideas.
But not all of them work. Charles Darke's adoption of a second childhood, whether conscious or not, as a means of protecting himself from himself, is compellingly credible. But the presence of licensed beggarsin a society not locatedin any particular time or any declared political ideology simply doesn't wash. This science-fiction element of the book asks a sound but imagined question about our attitudes toward childhood, but jars with & detracts from the rest of the book's recognisable landscape.
As ever, Ian McEwan mixes concepts of philosophy & sociology with the minutiae of daily life. Stephen Lawes does not seem to be wholly credible, however. His mix of interests & capabilities seems to be a tad too eclectic, too widely & thinly spread for him to come across as convincingin any discipline. At times, he seems even peripheral, dashing from one event to the next merely to witness what the author wanted to illustrate.
But these are small criticisms of a magnificent book. Eventually the novel provides an uplifting experience. It takes the reader to places where the characters find themselves, places where they also want to be. Then, having reached their goal, much of what went before falls into new perspectives, & the whole process might just be ready to start again, but this timein socially-changed garb. It's a bit like life, really...
the quantom child - By: Mr. P. O'hara, 17 May 2010 
WE have all lost the childin time, eg, ourselves, our childhood is over yet lives on...McEwan gives this platitude a neat spin by dramatising it as abduction & by threading a concern with quantom physics (time bending,counter-intuitive concepts of space/time etc)through the narrative.
Fab.
A Curious mish-mash - By: Peter Scott, 30 Aug 2009 
This is a curious mish-mash of a book, quite unlike Mr.McEwan's normal tightly plotted & narrative driven style. It suffers from a number of clashing strands & themes - the abduction of the child, a government minister driven back into childhood fantasy by the homo-erotic leanings of a Prime Minister, a somewhat autobiograhical description of a post war serviceman's family life, the beginnings of a Clive Ponting type story about the leak of a controversial goverment report & a spot of time-travelling. All of these are promising but put together they do tend to getin the way of one another. For an ordinary writer this book would be interesting. For a writer of Mr. McEwan's great gifts it's rather a waste of material.
Original, fascinating and slightly dystopian - By: BookWorm, 08 Mar 2009 A fascinating novel, with original themes, written skillfully. 'The Child In Time' has a slightly dystopian feel, setin a UK with a Big Brother-ish government. The protagonist is Stephen Lewis, a children's author whose own daughter was kidnapped three years before the main story is set. The major theme is childhood, & the wayin which children perceive time. As such the story mixes intellectual elements of storyline to do with the nature of time, with Stephen's emotional journey to cope with the loss of his child.
There is something oddly disjointed about the book which gives it a rather spooky, surreal feeling. Elements of it really don't ring true - the character of Charles Darke, for one, others being the easein which Stephen walks into a primary school unchallenged & the relative lack of furore over the kidnap of Kate - given the massive media interest that usually gets shownin such cases. I also wasn't entirely convinced by the ending.
That said, it's a bold idea & its freshness & originality are to be applauded. McEwan does write well, rarely becoming overly intellectual despite the nature of some of his themes. This is a complex book & one that I imagine would be good to study for English Literature. It's also not a bad casual read either.
mcewan at his best - By: R. Altman, 20 Nov 2008 the childin time is a good example of what mcewan is all about. not the place to go for a gripping page turner, but thoroughly absorbingin every stroke of the pen.
mcewan is aware of the complexities of life, & through a linear medium is able to present a layered, textured, 3-dimensional portrayal of the situations under his attentive gaze, characterised by his micro-vision.
the childin the title is at once a central character, the nature of children & child rearing, & the childin all of us, as it comes & goes. similarly, the rest of the title refers to timesin life & lifetimes, the particular timein our history, pure timein existence. (perhaps at the time of writing, 20 years younger, mcewan was more interested than he might be today,in questions of coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity & the like, laced with the mystical possibilities of the then new physics.) so the title itself is already a paradigm for the entire work & the method of working.
the writing is delightful; incisive & insightful, sympathetic & at times poetic.
an excellent introduction for newcomers & a treat for fans.
