The Child in Time

Ian McEwan

At first I thought Ian McEwan's 1987 novel was going to be about coping with child loss. Then it seemed to be as much about the collapse of a marriage following a trauma. Then it seemed to deal with the nervous breakdown of a public figure. And weighty themes to do with the science of "time" are also pushed to the forefront of the plot and then allowed to slip away again. In the end I wasn't sure what the point of any of it was.

The lost child is three-year-old Kate; the marriage is that of her parents, Stephen and Julie. Kate is snatched at the start of the story in a London supermarket. The breakdown is Charles's, friend of Stephen and junior minister in the government (well, ex-minister once he starts wearing shorts, drinking lemonade and climbing trees in Suffolk). Having said that, Stephen and Julie, the grieving parents, suffer breakdowns of a sort too.

In between all this are large chunks devoted to Stephen's attendance at the Reading & Writing Sub-committee of the government's Official Commission on Childcare. Actually, these are the best bits of the novel. I don't think anyone does the British Establishment in fiction better than McEwan. I loved Amsterdam (I might be the only person who did other than the 1998 Booker judges who, everyone seems to agree, were having a collective off-day) for its unlikeable trio of Clive the composer, Foreign Secretary Garmony and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday. And in The Child in Time the blackly comic star is the reptilian Lord Parmenter who quietly "gargles" each meeting to order. Come to think of it, does anyone do names quite as perfectly as McEwan? If you were born Julian Garmony it would be your duty to become conservative party Foreign Secretary. And if there isn't a real life Lord Parmenter presiding over some dusty committee in Whitehall then there jolly well ought to be.

The Prime Minister makes two strange, enjoyable, cameo appearances in the plot. And one of McEwan's little games in the novel is never to reveal the sex of the P.M. (a bit like the refusal to name the location in The Comfort of Strangers even though it screams "Venice" at every turn). I wondered when McEwan supposed us to think it was set. He makes a couple of half-hearted attempts to make it futuristic (there are hordes of uniformed, licensed beggars, for example, and society seems to have gone through a mild post-Thatcherite law and order meltdown) but otherwise it's more or less set in the present day.

I thought it was a disappointment. From an author who's written tautly controlled novels like The Comfort of Strangers, Enduring Love, Atonement etc - novels which seemed to know exactly where they were going - The Child in Time is a curiously shapeless and aimless affair.