Every sentence Ian McEwan writes seems to come from a depth of erudition, a richness of experience, an acute perceptiveness. He speaks with the voice of all the British greats, updated and with subject matter appropriate to our times. But he’s definitely canonical. And he’s not afraid to be a bit old-fashioned, to write a story from a single point of view if it suits him. The Child in Time, an early, pre-Atonement novel, benefits from McEwan’s surfeit of talent, his sharp intelligence combined with that dry, ironic humor that convinces you a writer is telling the truth about some people.

So I suppose we have no choice but to forgive McEwan when his plots toy with artifice or, in the case of this novel, completely surrender to it. Stephen Lewis, a successful children’s novelist had initially hoped to become a Joyce or a Mann or possibly even a Shakespeare with the story of his hippie travels in the Middle East, which he planned to call Hashish. But somehow he got stuck in his childhood. His publisher, Charles Darke, becomes his friend and so does Darke’s wife Thelma, a physicist, whose profession provides the excuse for much of the speculative thought that gives the novel a flavor of science fiction. Time, we are reminded, is fluid, non-linear, multi-dimensional. Under the influence of its fluidity, and some mind-bending supplied by grief, Stephen is granted a vision of the past, while Charles simply tries to live in it.

Stephen grieves because he has lost his daughter – literally lost her, at the supermarket while unloading his cart onto the conveyor. The novel appears to be set in the 1980s, before cell phones, laptops, and well before the U.K. became a surveillance state. One of the novel’s many surreal or dystopian elements includes the fact that there is no Scotland Yard. A three-year old child goes missing, is presumably kidnapped, and after a couple of weeks the cops simply shrug their shoulders and move on to other things. Stephen’s marriage flounders as his wife deals with her grief, and they begin to live apart. He gets a close look at the workings of British politics as part of a strange committee to create a comprehensive plan for the raising of children in a society run by conservatives, i.e., as cold and profit-focused as the Trump administration. Among the many surreal elements is the fact that the Prime Minister has no gender, so we can only assume it’s Margaret Thatcher.

The problem is, while Stephen and the lovely and talented Julie grieve, they are perhaps understandably reluctant to ponder the fate of their little girl, Kate. Stephen seems to feel she is simply being raised by another family, people who wanted a cute little girl and decided to pick one up at the market. The deeply horrifying fates of children who are trafficked or brutally murdered are not examined as possibilities, and in a way, the reader is grateful. But it’s a little weird how Stephen and Julie just stop looking and focus on their own emotions. Of course, McEwan isn’t a thriller writer. He just wanted to gorgeously noodle around with ideas about time and new beginnings and a cast of characters with some interesting quirks. You almost get the feeling he had these characters and ideas hanging around, and he just needed a plot to stick them in. So when you finish this book, tell yourself to quit worrying about that three-year-old kid out there, with God knows what happening to her. Accept that she was merely a device to kick off a bunch of interesting thoughts. Ian McEwan was just using her.

Een nachtmerrie voor iedere ouder, de plotselinge verdwijning van je kind.
Maar de zoektocht naar de 3-jarige Kate heeft toch niet echt een prominente plaats in de roman, het verhaal wordt puur vanuit de vader, Stephen,verteld. Aanvankelijk zwerft hij dagen over straat almaar zoekend, de greep op de gebeurtenissen en op de werkelijkheid kwijt. Stephen en zijn vrouw verwerken dit niet echt samen, gaan daarin hun eigen weg. Raken ook elkaar kwijt.

Het is vooral ook een zoektocht van Stephen naar zichzelf. Hij keert zich in zichzelf en tevens terug in de tijd. Ziet een visioen van zijn (nog jonge) ouders in een kroeg. In een heel mooie passage, tegen het einde van de roman, praat hij met zijn moeder Claire hierover. Ze vertelt over een dag, lang geleden toen ze met Douglas (Stephens vader) sprak over het al dan afbreken van een (ongeplande) zwangerschap. Claire vertelt Stephen: ‘Ik zie het nog even duidelijk als ik jou zie. Er was een gezicht achter het raam, het gezicht van een kind dat er leek te zweven. Het keek de kroeg in. Het had een bepaalde smekende blik, en het was zo wit, zo wit als aspirine. Het staarde me recht in het gezicht. Ik realiseer me, nadat ik er al die jaren over nagedacht heb, dat het waarschijnlijk het zoontje van de eigenaar was of een kind van een van de boerderijen in de buurt. Maar destijds was ik ervan overtuigd, wist ik gewoon dat ik naar mijn eigen kind keek. Je zou kunnen zeggen dat ik naar jou keek’
Dit incident sterkt Claire in haar besluit het kind te krijgen en dat het haar verantwoordelijkheid is Douglas daarvan te overtuigen.

Ontroering is er soms ook bij terugkijken naar de tijd met Kate, bijvoorbeeld de passage over een vakantie naar Cornwall met de bouw van een zandkasteel.
“Toen alles af was en ze bewonderend een aantal keren om hun bouwwerk hadden gelopen, kropen ze erin en wachtten binnen de muren op de vloed. Kate was ervan overtuigd dat hun kasteel zo sterk was dat het de zee kon weerstaan. Stephen en Julie speelden het spel mee, ze bespotten het water toen het nog maar net tegen de kanten klotste en jouwden het uit toen het een stuk muur meezoog. Op het moment dat ze zaten te wachten op de definitieve ondergang smeekte Kate, die tussen hen in zat geklemd, om in het kasteel te blijven. Ze wilde dat ze erin zouden gaan wonen”

Het begrip ‘tijd’ komt steeds weer terug, is een belangrijk thema.
Stephens goede vriend Charles bijvoorbeeld, die plotsklaps zijn verantwoordelijke job in de politiek verlaat om zich met vrouw terug te trekken op het platteland. Hij maakt een opmerkelijke transformatie door, gedraagt zich weer en leeft weer als een kind.
“Hij wilde de veiligheid van de kindertijd, de machteloosheid, de gehoorzaamheid, en ook de ermee gepaard gaande vrijheid, vrij van geld, beslissingen, plannen, eisen. Hij zei altijd dat hij aan de tijd wilde ontsnappen, aan afspraken, roosters, tijdlimieten. Kind zijn betekende voor hem tijdloosheid, hij sprak erover alsof het een mystieke toestand was.”

"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."

'The Child in Time,' is set in 1980's London and society and this book seems pretty bleak. A fight between a Soviet and an American athlete at the recent Olympics has nearly escalated into nuclear war; although she is never named it is pretty obvious that Margaret Thatcher is Britain's Prime Minister and her Government has undertaken all sorts of cutbacks, home-owners have lost touch with their neighbours living separate lives whilst licensed beggars roam the streets of London.

The book opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, one morning, decides to let his wife have a lie in and takes his 3-year-old daughter, Kate, with him to the supermarket, while waiting in the check-out line, she suddenly disappears - apparently kidnapped by a stranger. Despite extensive searches, posters and flyers she isn't found. Whilst Stephen roams the streets in search for Kate, his wife, Julie, stays at home, retreating further and further into her private grief. Lost in their own despair the couple start to drift apart; and as the weeks turn into months, their marriage falls apart. Julie moves to an isolated cottage in the countryside whilst Stephen spends his days watching television and daydreaming.

Through a series of flashbacks, including in to his own childhood, the reader cannot but help feeling a great deal of compassion for Stephen and his shifting emotions but in truth he isn't a particularly likeable character. Royalty payments from his books means that Stephen doesn't have to go out to work and virtually the only time that he leaves his flat is to attend Westminster committee meetings on the Official on Child Care where he spends his time daydreaming and barely participating. When one day after mistaking a little girl in a school-yard for Kate, Stephen realises that his life is spinning out of control, and he takes steps to create a new routine for himself.

Alongside Stephen's own struggles his friend Charles Darke is also slowing slipping into madness, unable to reconcile his childish nature and his adult responsibilities. This serves to mirror Stephen's own precarious mental state. Just as Kate's disappearance provides a terrible illustration of the loss of innocence so Charles's mental decline is a heavy-handed metaphor for Stephen's own inability to retrieve his youth. Stephen tries to help Charles's wife, Thelma, but is equally ineffectual there as well.

The absurd Committee meetings and Stephen's encounters with the Prime Minister add a little light relief to what is a largely depressing storyline. Throughout the book there are a series of set piece elements mainly centred around loss, some of which worked whereas some were less effective IMHO. I have read several of McEwan's books in the past and been generally disappointed with them but this one despite its rather depressing subject matter I found compulsive reading and hard to put down.

Bambini perduti

Ho letto che questo libro parla di un genitore che smarrisce una bambina, dunque mi ci sono fiondato, perché pure a me è successo. Mio figlio l'ho ritrovato dopo una decina di minuti (credo, ho perso un po' la cognizione del tempo) ed è stato un modo per sperimentare un discreto panico. Come vada al protagonista del libro, naturalmente qui non lo dico.

Ho letto questo libro anche perché avevo già letto un'altra opera di McEwan, Solar, e mi era piaciuto molto. Bambini nel tempo pure mi è piaciuto molto, a tratti mi ha un po' spiazzato (e va bene).

Nota: Einaudi ha scelto di mettere in appendice alcune delle recensioni che il libro ha ricevuto, che non mi sono piaciute. Perché sono il festival dello spoiler e perché le trovate - al mio occhio, sia chiaro - scentrate. Se avessi letto prima le recensioni, non avrei poi letto il libro.

Sublime reading

Such evocative descriptions of tumultuous thoughts and dull routines. Always just below the surface feelings trembled like earthquakes. Satisfying yet disturbing - that’s what I live about Ian McEwan’s books...

(3.5) This is the second-earliest of the 12 McEwan books I’ve read. It won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction (now the Costa Novel Award) in 1987. It’s something of a bizarre jumble (from the protagonist’s hobbies of Arabic and tennis lessons plus drinking onwards), yet everything clusters around the title’s announced themes of children and time.

Stephen Lewis’s three-year-old daughter, Kate, was abducted from a supermarket three years ago. The incident is recalled early in the book, as if the remainder will be about solving the mystery of what happened to Kate. But such is not the case. Her disappearance is an unalterable fact of Stephen’s life that drove him and his wife apart, but apart from one excruciating scene later in the book when he mistakes a little girl on a school playground for Kate and interrogates the principal about her, the missing child is just subtext.

Instead, the tokens of childhood are political and fanciful. Stephen, a writer whose novels accidentally got categorized as children’s books, is on a government committee producing a report on childcare. On a visit to Suffolk, he learns that his publisher, Charles Darke, who later became an MP, has reverted to childhood, wearing shorts and serving lemonade up in a treehouse. Meanwhile, Charles’s wife, Thelma, is a physicist researching the nature of time. For Charles, returning to childhood is a way of recapturing timelessness. There’s also an odd shared memory that Stephen and his mother had four decades apart: Stephen is sure he sees younger versions of his parents at the Bell pub; later, he hears from his mother about the day she and his father stopped at a pub during a bike ride and she told him she was pregnant. He was steering her towards an abortion, but she saw a face outside the window and knew it was her future son’s. Even tiny details add to the time theme, like Stephen’s parents meeting when his father returned a defective clock to the department store where his mother worked.

This is McEwan, so you know there’s going to be at least one contrived but very funny scene. Here that comes in Chapter 5, when Stephen is behind a flipped lorry and goes to help the driver. He agrees to take down a series of (increasingly outrageous) dictated letters but gets exasperated at about the same time it becomes clear the young man is not approaching death. Instead, he helps him out of the cab and they celebrate by drinking two bottles of champagne. This doesn’t seem to have much bearing on the rest of the book, but is the scene I’m most likely to remember.

Other noteworthy elements: Stephen has a couple of run-ins with the Prime Minister; though this is clearly Margaret Thatcher, McEwan takes pains to neither name nor so much as reveal the gender of the PM. Homeless people and gypsies show up multiple times, making Stephen uncomfortable but also drawing his attention. I couldn’t decide if this was a political point about Thatcher’s influence, or whether the homeless were additional stand-ins for children in a paternalistic society, representing vulnerability and (misplaced) trust.

This is a book club read for our third monthly Zoom meeting. While it’s a strange and not entirely successful book, I think it will give us a lot to talk about: the good and bad aspects of reverting to childhood, whether it matters if Kate ever comes back, the caginess about Thatcher, and so on.

Terzo libro che leggo di questo autore e, anche questa volta, sono stata catturata dalla sua bravura.
Questa è una storia di dolore, perdita e lutto resa ancora più tragica dal fatto che non parliamo di morte vera e propria ma di scomparsa. Stephan infatti è un famoso autore di libri per bambini quando, in una normale giornata passata al supermercato, perde la figlia Kate.
Rapita? Uccisa? Abusata? O semplicemente persa? Queste sono le idee che sorgono nella mente di Stephen e che lo tormenteranno per tutta la sua vita, anche a distanza di anni dalla scomparsa della figlia.
Stephan la cerca, la vede nei volti delle altre bambine, ma più passa il tempo e più questa sfrenata ricerca si abbatte come un' ossessione sulla vita di Stephan e di sua moglie.
Attraverso la straordinaria prosa di McEwan viviamo insieme al protagonista tutte le fasi che susseguono questo tragico evento, l'incredulità, la rabbia, la ricerca, il dolore e infine l'elaborazione della perdita, tracciando un percorso di ascesa e infine di rinascita.

placeholder review.... while I still try to puzzle this book out.

(don't get it)

time-shifting as post-modern take on grief?

read instead, Atonement, Amsterdam, Enduring Love

Stephen Lewis, the successful writer of a children's book, has had his life fall apart after the disappearance of his three-year-old daughter. His wife has left him and he faces the daily self-examination of what is left of his life as he goes through the stages of grief. 'More than two years on and still stuck, still trapped in the dark, enfolded with his loss, shaped by it, lost to the ordinary currents of feeling that moved far above him and belonged exclusively to other people.'

Just who is 'the child in time?' Is it the daughter who will always remain three years old in her parents' minds/memories? Is it Stephen himself who is stuck in his grief, unable to move on? Is it his friend, Charles Darke, who longs 'to escape from time, from appointments, schedules, deadlines' and be like a child again?

McEwan plays with time in this novel--having it slow down on some occasions; in another, Stephen has an experience 'out of time.' Stephen's mother speaks of the timelessness of some long-ago memories which make them seem as fresh as the present moment. The scientific theories of time are explained by a physicist. Stephen wonders does the passage of time make one a grown up?

The story does bog down in a few spots but hold on, things get better and the story ends on a hopeful note. I have read several of McEwan's books and always find my patience is rewarded. His writing is so exquisite!

#book-vipers-book-hunter: CHILD

Primo approccio con McEwan, che dire? Questo romanzo mi ha fatto provare tutta una serie di emozioni contrastanti. Ora non mi resta che vedere la trasposizione cinematografica che vede come attore protagonista: Benedict Cumberbacht. *-*

A very depressing look into dealing with the vanishing of a child, and the trying times of overcoming and adjusting to life after the disappearance of a child with no answers. Fun time, good ending, read it for a good time!

There is something un-McEwanesque afoot, especially in the ending …

Not that there isn’t the tension and horror you expect from McEwan in this novel that’s set some time in the near future of the late eighties, but looking back some three years as well (a period that’s now 30 years ago, I have to keep reminding myself).

A brilliant first chapter captures the unfolding horror of three-year-old Kate’s abduction from a routine supermarket trip with her father, the noted children’s writer Stephen Lewis: the surreal time-distorting re-enactment that Stephen goes through repeatedly; his obsessive neighbourhood-patrolling to find her; his paralysis of denial that’s now into its third year; his wife Julie’s totally different way of attempting to cope with their daughter’s disappearance, that leads inevitably to their separation. All this is related with the usual McEwan finesse that that makes for breathtaking reading.

And although the subsequent chapters can’t quite match that perfection of timing and everything else, I love this work because, after a year or so, when Stephen and Julie have separately come to terms with their grief, a reconciliation occurs: it’s McEwan writing about love without a macabre or excruciatingly sad ending, and I am so glad to have read this.

On its own this would have been a shortish novella, but the story brings in a number of related themes connected with childhood and perceptions of time. Central is Stephen seconded on to a government committee on childcare; for much of the time it’s his only relief from obsessive thinking, and its time-dilating dullness contrasts with the apparent compression of time that McEwan works into a couple of incidents.
In one, Stephen thinks he sees Kate in a local school playground and pursues her into the school with an inevitable excruciating let-down; in another, while driving he has a near-miss with a crashed van where a couple of seconds morph into slow-motion avoidance. (This last episode also has – incongruously - a farcical encounter with the van driver who dictates what he thinks are his final words to Stephen)

Stephen’s friend, mentor and publisher Charles Darke also has a significant role, and much of the story is taken up with his regression into childhood under the guise of living out a dream of returning to some elemental state, the paradisical childhood he never had; it’s a form of madness and ends with his death.

There is also a time-warping incident where Stephen hallucinates or dreams about a near-encounter with his parents before he was born. When Stephen relates this to his mother, she recalls the occasion (she had been pregnant at the time) and says she remembers seeing a boy where Stephen had been standing, who, she was certain, was her future son. Charles’s wife, a theoretical physicist, attempts to make sense of their experience by explaining how quantum physics and relativity deal with time and space - which he tunes out, of course. A foray by McEwan into Magical Realism?

Quite apart from all that, there’s McEwan’s satirical view of life under the Thatcher Tories – in addition to pointed scenes in the childcare committee’s interminable meetings, there are licensed beggars everywhere with government-issue begging bowls (a huge saving on welfare costs). The prime minister in fact makes several appearances in the story as Charles’s sometime close friend and mentor (Charles had been an MP for a few years before resigning abruptly). McEwan cleverly makes the PM’s identity and even gender indeterminate, however.

It's all a bit of a grab-bag of incidents. (quite the oddest to me, was a train journey from Charles’s house in the country just two hours from London. For some reason, McEwan has Stephen catching a sleeper from Scotland arriving at this little halt at an impossible time in the early morning. Was this a test to see how alert we were, or did McEwan slip up - perish the thought!)
Or was this just more magical realism grafted on to McEwan's usual hyper-realism?
Whatever, I didn’t think the expositions on time were particularly successful or added much to Stephen and Julie’s journey. But for all that, it was an excellent read.

About the movie
The 2017 Benedict Cumberbatch film, which I watched just after reading this, was also excellent and stuck closely to the spirit of the book (with some omissions of course, and re-cast into the present). I thought both the school playground and the Charles Darke episodes were in fact handled rather better - Charles discusses his predicament with Stephen in a way that didn’t happen in the book - and the only thing I found a bit surprising was that the PM was a much younger man, when in the book he/she was about 65, Margaret Thatcher’s age at the time. I wonder, were they suggesting a David Cameron figure instead?