Atroce.
Sono molto confusa, è stato come se non fosse nemmeno McEwan. Letto forse nel momento sbagliato?
Non sono riuscita a immaginare delle persone al di là della pagina che avevo davanti. È rimasto tutto piatto e inanimato: personaggi, trama, stile...
Purtroppo, non ho ritrovato lo scrittore di Nel guscio, da me tanto amato.
Ho portato a termine la lettura unicamente per potermi ricredere ma non è andata così, il finale ha solo confermato l’enorme delusione.

The Child in Time is the happiest of McEwan’s novels. It also fizzes with intelligence. Reflecting on his screenplay for the film The Ploughman’s Lunch, McEwan remarked that the characters started out bad and got worse. Here, they start out wounded and get better.

Though the year is never specified, the setting is plainly England in the 1980s. I don’t know why more isn’t made of the novel's political dimension. Politics and fiction, of course, go together like pyromaniacs and dynamite factories. Crudeness always beckons. McEwan avoids that. Instead, menace is built up with subtlety.

Here and there, you see what Britain has become. Begging has been legalised; a government bowl is supplied to qualifying down-and-outs as part of a warped bid to encourage thrift and independence. Schools are closing or being sold off to private investors; rumours abound that the leaving age will be lowered. The State’s role has been recast in simpler terms: to uphold the law and defend the party against its enemies. Worse, there is general ‘instinctive siding in all matters with the strong, the exaltation of self-interest’. Writers become universal by being particular.

Our hero is Stephen Lewis, a popular children’s author. His career is a fortunate mistake: he owes his success to a manuscript being delivered to the wrong desk, whose owner duly pulls him out the slush pile and publishes him to great success.

I still find the description of Stephen’s first steps into fiction absorbing, and invigoratingly life-like. A good deal of Stephen’s back-story is also McEwan’s. Like McEwan, he has returned from a trip to Afghanistan in a painted bus filled with drugged-up hippies. He has a craving for order – a trait he shares with Briony from Atonement. Like McEwan, he writes at night by candles to spice up the romance of his calling. The novel he starts is essentially about his travels but to his amazement morphs into something different.

Stephen’s amazement may bring ironic chuckles to some readers, as with his other discoveries. (He wants to be accessible, ‘but not to everyone’.) Canny readers may spot that Stephen’s first visit to his publisher is held in a converted broom cupboard, which sounds remarkably similar to the rooms that Jonathan Cape’s editors work in.

As often happens with McEwan, the plot grows from a tragic incident. Stephen’s little daughter Kate is kidnapped while visiting the supermarket. McEwan, it must be said, pulls of the scene with enviable panache. I can recall the chill I felt when reading the scene in my late teens: it has not weakened now that I'm in my late 30s and a parent.

While keeping his prose clear and smooth, he captures the numbed, stop-start way we view our crises. He probes the tragedy’s aftermath with lethal accuracy. Stephen passes through a frenzied period of list-making, door-to-door campaigning, followed by alcoholic grief, and attempts to rationalise (she may have been taken by an infertile couple).

Without realising it, Stephen catches himself looking at passing children for phantom Kates. He still buys her birthday presents, like offerings to a lost goddess, in the hopes she will return to open them. His marriage ends, and Stephen fills his days drinking Scotch and raging at the TV while still on his underwear.

Then reality ruptures. There is a scene where Stephen stops by a country pub, and sees, via a hole in the fabric of time, a vision of a woman - Stephen's Mother, still young, and pregnant with him. It is later revealed that his Mother remembers a vision of a ghostly child looking at her through a window. That vision, she divulges, was what persuaded her to keep her child. ‘It was the window now, a complete self, begging her for its existence, and it was inside her, unfolding intricately, living off the pulse of her blood. [...] She felt herself to be in love with it, whoever it was. A love affair had begun.’

I can’t think of many writers that have affirmed the importance of family in their work as Ian McEwan has, entirely without ‘moral majority’ pomposity. Soon later, Stephen and his wife reconcile and conceive a new child to replace Kate. They realise they can’t retrieve the past, and come to feel – which is a much harder thing than to merely know – that they have to go forwards. The birth scene that closes the book is, for my money, the most artfully conceived of all McEwan’s endings, and is that rarest of things: a thoroughly earned, convincing happy ending.

True, the novel has its blemishes. McEwan often succumbs to the urge to tell rather than show. One character exists solely to info-dump on the reader; a sub-plot doesn’t merge with complete success into the main plot. A lot of the novel’s scaffolding has been left intact rather than dismantled. But the novel survives its flaws, and boasts an emotional punching power never bettered in McEwan’s oeuvre. All parents should read it.

4.5/5

I didn't realise I'd read this before. I had strong deja vu at the start. 

The Child In Time is an excellent novel that explores loss, grief, and childhood. Strangely the writing feels both opaque and simple at the same time. On this second read I've found it preferable to read slowly and savour both the prose and the plot. Ian McEwan has a knack for putting into words human feelings and experiences that the less skilled, such as myself, struggle to articulate. 

There were a few tangents on science and philosophy that felt a bit flat when compared to the rest of the text. It could have done without it, but having read a lot of McEwan I've come to accept he likes to deliver a bit of education in most of his novels.

I think this is in my top 5 McEwan novels.

Este livro foi a minha estreia com o autor pois a constante emissão de sinais do universo assim o exigiu! :D Foi uma boa leitura pois a companheira dos livros é excelente -obrigada, Cristina! Já a história deixou muito a desejar. Houve capítulos que apreciei, a relação do Stephen com a Julie e as recordações dos pais de Stephen. Já os outros pareceram-me saídos do nada e até no universo da distopia, como se fosse uma realidade alternativa.

An astonishing novel..!

2.5 Stars

The Child in Time felt like it tried too hard. I think McEwan was going for literary, and if he got there, I didn't get it. The beginning is unbearably slow, but it does pick up towards the end. IDK, just not for me, and by the looks of reviews, not for most others either.

This was sublime writing that served as an antidote to a couple of books I’ve read recently which had technical problems. It jumps around time, the writing is fine, the narrative grips your heart and moves; there’s clarity even as there is metaphor and no neat story, and there is absolutely no showing off.

The Child in Time is my tenth Ian McEwan book, and the only straight-forward aspect here is the title. Of the books that I’ve read, this is the most daring. A child is stolen. A child/man dies. There is a battle between adult and child desires. A child is born. There is mergence. And for all of this, time is a mutable mysterious thing. I won’t try to analyze this; that’s a task for each reader. But I will say there is a lot to think and feel about—way more than I can write in a quick review immediately after closing the last page.

****I've tried not to be hugely insensitive, but possibly not succeeded. Given the subject matter I can imagine that this book has touched people, may be beloved by readers, may have helped people out of dark times or just pulled hard on certain heart-strings. I wouldn't want anyone to read me ragging on it and think I'm in any way having a go at people in this situation generally or even the experience readers may have derived from it. This is purely my personal beef with Ian McEwan's book, which I didn't really like at all.****


McEwan's writing is as strong and impressive here as it is smug.

That probably sounds unfair, but I reckon he's blatantly gunning for that last category. Whether it's his attempt to be the most world-weary kid in school when he mentions politics, his lazy attempt to invoke some nebulous quantum theory to explain why some weird stuff might be going down, swiftly followed by his physicist friend telling him that this is very silly stuff and really this sort of magic doesn't happen, or his casual slapping down of anyone that isn't like Ian McEwan (sorry, I mean Stephen... Lewis?), most memorably the self-satisfaction when he describes the hopelessly naive young novelist, or maybe finally the way he neatly sums up the relationship between the male and female in a knowing way because he, Ian McEwan, possibly speaking as Stephen Lewis, is basically brilliant.

It's probably just the mood I'm in, but what I really resent about it is that McEwan does want to have his cake and eat it too. I like the concept, actually, of Kate lost adrift in time (maybe even stolen by time itself), passing through the present just enough to send her former parents doolally. Stephen himself echoes to the past to prevent his own non-existence. Charles is lost in time also. Stephen's parents do battle with their youth still. It's not a subtle theme but it'll do (Obviously, the adult women can't mess around in the time-streams because they are really just mothers and lovers for the male characters to bounce off, but never mind).

However, McEwan can't let us have that, because as Stephen Lewis he is far too practical minded and world-learned to believe in that sort of stuff. At every turn he nullifies the action and belief of his character(s) with self-awareness, in particular during the bizarre side-plotting. The whole world is a smorgasbord of incredible things that touch other people deeply and that draw us in just enough for the narrator to snatch them away because PEOPLE LIKE US KNOW BETTER THAN ANY OF THAT.

I don't know how Stephen Lewis manages to have the most wonderfully socially agreeable mental breakdown. I guess it helps that everyone in the entire world is a writer because that way they can stay indoors all day terribly miserable and avoid human contact and not hurt anyone else too much. I mean, that one chap did commit suicide from neglect, but it was hardly his fault, he was a nutter and already gone. Even his wife absolved him of guilt. COMPLETELY. CONVENIENTLY. DON'T WORRY STEPHEN LEWIS YOU'RE STILL A SWELL GUY.

I don't feel that the main character in a novel has to be a sympathetic one. Usually, I would sooner they transgressed meaningfully. But this dude was a total pain, even allowing for the ghastly pain that surely anyone would feel having lost a child. And that would be appalling. And you know, the result would be a form of discombobulation so dire that you could hardly represent it in a readable novel. It would just be a volume littered with dead-ends and solipsistic soul-searching. It would be a pain to read. It's hard to know, on this basis, whether The Child In Time is a success or not. The criteria are sort of woolly. So all I can say is whether I enjoyed it? Most emphatically not.

I guess finally I'd say that I didn't read this book in 1987. If I had, maybe the ending wouldn't be the most ghastly cliché of new life triumphing over death. Maybe this was genuinely a triumph. For me, it just elicited a groan. She was secretly pregnant from their one desperate clinch borne out of grief and confusion. Her regaining of motherhood was sufficient to clear the poison from both their systems and restore Kate's place in time: stone cold dead. Now they can get round to dealing with the new one.

And throughout, impeccably nicely written.

3.5 stars. An enjoyable, interesting, well written novel. Stephen Lewis, a successful children’s author (by accident!), is on a supermarket shopping outing when his 3 year old daughter, Kate, is kidnapped. We follow Stephen’s life, his friendship with Charles his first publisher, his relationship with his parents, his parliamentary committee work of bringing up children, and his deteriorating relationship with his wife, Julie.

Here is an example of McEwan’s writing style:
‘For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say “When I grow up”, there is always an edge of disbelief - how could they ever be other than what they are?’

Readers new to Ian McEwan should begin with his novels, Atonement, The Children Act and Saturday.

Ian McEwan, THE CHILD IN TIME (Penguin, 1987)

Something happened to a number of bang-up in-for-the-kill horror writers in the early to mid eighties. I'm still trying to figure out what. Patrick McGrath, who'd given the world some of its most wonderfully gut-wrenching tales in _Blood and Water_, started writing slick, witty novels that came to just this side of horror. Clive Barker started writing fantasy. Anne Rivers Siddons gave us one of the definitive modern haunted house novels and then started churning out "women's novels."

And then we have Ian McEwan.

McEwan's first novel, _The Cement Garden_, is one of the most unpredictably horrific novels in the last half-century. It's a thing of absolute beauty, comparable to Koja's _The Cipher_, Deveraux's _Deadweight,_ and a handful of other horror novels that push the envelope so far that the reader will have second thoughts about ever reading another novel by the author. Then McEwan dropped out of sight for a while, released a second novel I haven't been able to track down (so this transformation may be earlier than I suspect), and finally got major-label recognition with this, his third full-length offering.

The Child in Time is the story of a couple whose daughter is abducted in broad daylight in a crowded supermarket. The two of them react differently to the disappearance as time goes on with no ransom note, and the inevitable breakup occurs. We phase in right there, not long after the breakup, and follow the husband, Stephen, as he tries to put his life back together while simultaneously watching his best friend come apart.

I want to savage this book. I want to get McEwan back for taking one of the most promising careers in horror fiction and turning it into a career writing slice-of-life novels that culminated in a Booker Prize. But I can't do it. The Child in Time is in no way a horror novel, of

course, and it doesn't really classify as a mystery, but it's certainly not a slice of life novel. It combines drama, a little mystery, and a sense of the detached in much the same way as Graham Swift's masterwork, Waterland. And it's quite readable. But fans of earlier McEwan will always be waiting for the shoe to drop (preferably weighted down with something, and on someone's head to make that satisfying splattering noise)... and it never does.

It's good for what it is, I just wanted it to be something else. And I can't fault McEwan for that. Still, I suggest starting off with The Cement Garden to get the full view of McEwan's considerable writing power before taking on this much more minimal work. ***

It's not correct to say I finished this book; I just stopped reading. With one exception (The Innocent) I have put down every McEwan book I tried to read. I find his initial premises fascinating, but after 50 pages or so, I start to get bogged down in what I would call "over-writing," by which I mean writing for the author and not the reader. The story becomes relatively meaningless, and even the characters are subservient to the writer's phrase. I'm probably in a minority, but that's my take.

Romanzo straordinario sul sentimento della perdita e del tempo, quest’opera analizza tali e tanti temi controversi che è difficile ridurla in poche parole.
“Bambini nel tempo” è la storia di una scomparsa, ma il lettore si accorge, pagina dopo pagina, di non sapere chi e cosa è stato davvero smarrito: la vita del protagonista è sconvolta dalla perdita della figlia o non, piuttosto, dall’emorragia di giorni che lo condanna alla deriva della maturità?
È l’odissea di una coppia di genitori disperati o di un eterno Peter Pan, bambino sospeso nel tempo, grottesco nel sacrificare l’oggi della maturità a un inafferrabile ieri?
Ian McEwan sorprende e sconvolge con una storia difficile, fatta di riflessioni incisive e poche, pochissime concessioni all’autocompiacimento autorale. Ne deriva un affresco spietato non solo di un’immaginaria Inghilterra post-thatcheriana, ma dell’intero nostro tempo, sospeso tra una ‘adultizzazione precoce’ e l’eterno rimpianto di un’infanzia spesa a inseguire sogni e uccelli nel bosco del ricordo.