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Ian McEwan

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The Child in Time (Ian McEwan Series) Kindle Edition

by Ian McEwan (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 1,896 ratings

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A child’s abduction sends a father reeling in this Whitbread Award-winning novel that explores time and loss with “narrative daring and imaginative genius” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children’s books, is on a routine trip to the supermarket with his three-year-old daughter. In a brief moment of distraction, she suddenly vanishes—and is irretrievably lost. From that moment, Lewis spirals into bereavement that effects his marriage, his psyche, and his relationship with time itself: “It was a wonder that there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none at all.”

In The Child in Time, acclaimed author Ian McEwan “sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time” producing “a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication” that has been adapted into a PBS Masterpiece movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

“A beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel.” —Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Child in Time opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, takes his 3-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. Just like that. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself: "It was a wonder there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none." This beautifully haunting book won a 1987 Whitbread Prize.

From Publishers Weekly

A sense of loss pervades this fine, provocative new novel by the author of The Comfort of Strangers. The protagonist, Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children's books, is introduced to us in a scene more frightening than any from a horror novel: while he is shopping with Kate, his three-year-old daughter, the child is kidnapped. Stephen's mounting terror as he combs the store for Katetrying in vain to recall the face of the dark-clad stranger he glimpsed behind themis palpable. As the story moves forward, it focuses not only on Stephen's search for his daughter, but also on his attempts to come to terms with his loss and the likely collapse of his marriage to Julie, a musician. Woven through the narrative is a subplot that deals with childhood and loss of a different sort. It is the innocence of youth that Stephen's friend and former editor, Charles Darke, longs for and ultimately recaptures at a terrible price. This is a beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel. First serial to Esquire.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

There are actually several childen in McEwan's new novel: Stephen Lewis's kidnapped daughter; the barefoot boy his friend Charles tries (with fatal results) to become; the hypothetical child under study by the Official Commission on Child Care, on one of whose subcommittees Stephen sits. And there are several fictional modes at work, ranging from a realistic account of wrenching personal loss to a satire on bureaucracy. Unfortunately these varying aspects undercut rather than reinforce one another, and the result is a muddle. English writer McEwan made his name with the scarifying stories in First Love, Last Rites ( LJ 6/15/75). Despite a happy ending, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that here he's working in an uncongenial genre. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Delicately nuanced prose...chilling brilliance...coupled with an astonishing degree of mature psychological insight, and the result is an extra-ordinarily fine example of the possibilities of fiction." Quill & Quire
"Marvellously written, moving, serious, rereadable, and draws on that innocence which great English writers have always been able to capture.... If you want to be appalled, refreshed, exhilarated, enlivened--read it." The Sunday Times
"Luminous, haunting, restrained...cuts to the core of human existence." Chicago Tribune
"A great pleasure to read.... McEwan writes as if Dickens, Lawrence, and Woolf were in his bones.... Funny and unsentimentally passionate." The Wall Street Journal
"Resonates with psychological reality: the beautifully layered relationships, the tracing of the many-layered love between father and child, husband and wife.... As artfully conceived as it is poignantly realized." The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children’s novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"...and for those parents, for too many years misguided by pallid relativism of self-appointed child-care experts..."
- The Authorized Child-Care Handbook,
Her Majesty's Stationery Office

Subsidizing public transport had long been associated in the minds of both government and the majority of its public with the denial of individual liberty.  The various services collapsed twice a day at rush hour when it was quicker, Stephen found, to walk from his flat at Whitehall than to take a taxi.  It was late May, barely nine-thirty, and already the temperature was nudging the eighties.  He strode to Vauxhall Bridge past double and treble files of trapped, throbbing cars, each with its solitary driver.  In tone the pursuit of liberty was more resigned than passionate.  Ringed fingers drummed patiently on the sill of a hot tin roof, white-shirted elbows poked through rolled-down windows.  There were newspapers spread over steering wheels.  Stephen stepped quickly through the crowds, through layers of car radio blather--jingles, high-energy breakfast DJs, news flashes, traffic "alerts."  Those drivers not reading listened stolidly.  The steady forward press of the pavement crowds must have conveyed to them a sense of relative motion, of drifting slowly backwards.

Jigging and weaving to overtake, Stephen remained as always, though barely consciously, on the watch for children, for a five-year-old girl.  It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken.  This was a disposition, the outline experience had stenciled on character.  It was not principally a search, though it had once been an obsessive hunt, and for a long time too.  Two years on, only vestiges of that remained; now it was a longing, a dry hunger.  There was a biological clock, dispassionate in its unstoppability, which let his daughter go on growing, extended and complicated her simple vocabulary, made her stronger, her movements surer.  The clock, sinewy like a heart, kept faith with an unceasing conditional: she would be drawing, she would be starting to read, she would be losing a milk tooth.  She would be familiar, taken for granted.  It seemed as though the proliferating instances might wear down this conditional, the frail, semiopaque screen whose fine tissues of time and chance separated her from him; she is home from school and tired, her tooth is under the pillow, she is looking for her daddy.

Any five-year-old girl --though boys would do -- gave substance to her continued existence.  In shops, past playgrounds, at the houses of friends, he could not fail to watch out for Kate in other children, or ignore them in the slow changes, the accruing competences, or fail to feel the untapped potency of weeks and months, the time that should have been hers.  Kate's growing up had become the essence of time itself.  Her phantom growth, the product of an obsessive sorrow, was not only inevitable -- nothing could stop the sinewy clock -- but necessary.  Without the fantasy of her continued existence he was lost, time would stop.  He was the father of an invisible child.

But here on Millbank there were only ex-children shuffling to work.  Further up, just before Parliament or Whitehall or within sight of the square.  But a few were taking advantage of the confluence of commuter routes.  He saw their bright badges from a couple of hundred yards away.  This was their weather, and they looked cocky with their freedom.  The wage-earners had to give way.  A dozen beggars were working both sides of the street, moving towards him steadily against the surge.  It was a child Stephen was watching now, not a five-year-old, but a skinny prepubescent.  She had registered him at some distance.  She walked slowly, somnambulantly, the regulation black bowl extended.  The office workers parted and converged about her.  Her eyes were fixed on Stephen as she came.  He felt the usual ambivalence.  To give money ensured the success of the government program.  Not to give involved some determined facing-away from private distress.  There was no way out.  The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right.  These days he left the matte to chance.  If he had small change in his pocket, he gave it.  If not, he gave nothing.  He never handed out banknotes.

The girl was brown-skinned from sunny days on the street.  She wore a grubby yellow cotton frock and her hair was severely cropped.  Perhaps she had been deloused.  As he distance closed he saw she was pretty, impish and freckled with a pointed chin.  She was no more than twenty feet away when she ran forward and took from the pavement a lump of still glistening chewing gum.  She popped it in her mouth and began to chew.  The little head tilted back defiantly as she looked again in his direction.

Then she was before him, the standard-issue bowl held out before her.  She had chosen him minutes ago, it was a trick they had.  Appalled, he had reached into his back pocket for a five-pound note.  She looked on with neutral expression as he set it down on top of the coins.

As soon as his hand was clear, the girl picked the note out, rolled it tight into her fist, and said, "Fuck you, mister."  She was edging round him.

Stephen put his hand on the hard, narrow shoulder and gripped.  "What was that you said?"

The girl turned and pulled away. The eyes had shrunk, the voice was reedy. "I said, Fank you, mister."  She was out of reach when she added, "Rich creep!"

Stephen showed empty palms in mild rebuke.  He smiled without parting his lips to convey his immunity to the insult.  But the kid had resumed her steady, sleepwalker's step along the street.  He watched her for a full minute before he lost her in the crowd.  She did not glance back.

From AudioFile

Though its subject matter concerns the disappearance of a child, McEwan's novel is intensely interior, concerning itself with the aftermath of this shattering event on the little girl's father, Stephen Lewis. The novel, perhaps McEwan's most tender, explores the rending caused by grievous loss and the possibility for restoration. It is no less a mediation on the nature of childhood and on time itself. Simon Prebble's performance is subtle and nuanced, portraying both the intellectualism of Lewis, the author of acclaimed children's novels, and the profound desperation and sorrow that have overwhelmed him. Prebble's reading is measured and undemonstrative--and more intense for it. M.O. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07XB48PRN
Publisher ‏ : ‎ RosettaBooks (February 8, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 8, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2910 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 274 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0385497520

Best Sellers Rank: #66,705 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #107 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #119 in Marriage & Divorce Fiction
- #756 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 1,896 ratings

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Ian McEwan

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Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

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Audrey

Touching

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2022

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This is the second book I've read recently that I was made aware of from the movie adaptation. Though this book is a rare case where I like the movie better, I still enjoyed the book immensely.

There are a few plot lines that make up the book. First and foremost is the disappearance of Stephen's daughter years prior. He's haunted by her memory, certain that one day he will find her. With this comes the separation from his wife, Julie, who has moved into seclusion to grieve in her own way. Stephen misses her and wants to reconcile though finds it a lost cause. Meanwhile, he carries on in his professional life the best he can. On this end, he must deal with the mental decline of his friend and publisher, Charles.

As the title suggests, the book ponders the perceptions of childhood and time and how those two things intermingle. Ian McEwan writes solely from Stephen's POV allowing a deeply introspective narrative. To a modern audience, the prose may border on cliche or is an outdated style. I personally enjoyed this, especially because Stephen is blunt in his selfishness and observations. Above else, I enjoyed the psychology behind the characters and the emphasis on how people experience grief in different ways — even between people with a shared trauma.

2 people found this helpful

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M. P. Friedman

A reader's book

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2012

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I have never read a McEwan that I failed to admire, enjoy, and feel challenged by, and this was no exception. The Virginia Woolf-like attention to the details of the day and the gorgeous prose were, of course, breathtaking, but what I liked best was how the author head fakes us regarding the direction of the book. It appears at the beginning that we are reading a thriller about a man's struggle to save his kidnapped daughter, but ultimately the kidnapping is merely the frame for a much broader and deeper meditation on the nature of time and its impact on the parent-child relationship. McEwan examines this relationship from a dizzying array of perspectives - the adult child viewing his younger parents, adults who become children or at least abdicate adulthood to varyious degrees, adult academics and politicians debating techniques of parenting and proper roles of children, adults choosing to become or not become parents, adults at the moment of becoming parents, and more - all in the context of time simultaneously passing and being frozen and becoming nonlinear.

Oddly, this dissertation places minimal attention the most obvious situation - parent interacting with young child. This most common of perspectives occurs only in the very uncommon and ominous prelude to the kidnapping. Instead, McEwan's "child" is more a concept that adults wrestle with than a fleshed character - except when, with typical McEwan perversity, adults become either childish or childlike. And yet what could have been cold intellectualization (see epigraphs that lead into each chapter to see what could have been) instead is emotionally rich, leading to a thoroughly satisfying and unexpected redemptive conclusion.

Final thought: Note how skillfully McEwan avoids assigning gender to the Prime Minister, then winks at us by commenting on bureaucrats doing the same. Sly dog!

12 people found this helpful

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I. Fagin

Compelling but flawed

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2012

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As I was reading this novel I didn't note who the author was. On the one hand, I wanted to stop reading. The story was all over the place. Why was it set in the future? What was the point of the licensed beggars? What was the point of a lot of the directions the story went it? And then in the end it was simply a story that seems to have been told so many times before.
What kept me reading? It was the beautiful writing and descriptions of both the inner and outer lives of the characters. I thought to myself: this author is awful at putting a story together but I will look for his next book because he is so skilled at writing. I certainly felt like an idiot when I found out who the author was, the creator of Atonement. This was an early novel by him. He doesn't need to be forgiven. I do.

15 people found this helpful

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Lynn

Another great story my Ian McEwan

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2018

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I first saw the movie this story was based upon. I was intrigued and I wanted to read the novel. I was completely absorbed by the writing and read it in one sitting.
There is a richness in the novel that was hard to capture
on film. It is a story about about incredible loss and the path of redemption and the healing and life affirming power of forgiveness.
It is a great read.

Lynn S.

15 people found this helpful

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Dash Manchette

Difficult but worthwhile

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2021

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THE CHILD IN TIME, I found, is sometimes a rather tough book to read. Its subject matter, of course, could not be darker. A child gone missing and the parents never see her, or hear anything about her, ever again. Adequately describing such a loss truly requires top literary skills to find the proper adjectives. McEwan is mostly up to the task, and the scene in which the pivotal event occurs is horrifying, especially as we the readers know the end result to begin with.

But this book was difficult to read for another reason. The missing child’s father, Stephen, is the main character around which the “action” unfolds. But there actually is very little action. I found the beginning of the book as well as its end to be captivating. The large middle of the book however is less about any occurrence, any true plot unfolding, and more a character study of Stephen and his relations to and interactions with others. That is a tougher, more introspective read. I realized, though, that that banality might be the point. The loss here is unspeakably tragic, completely random, and has the effect of changing several human lives in an instant. Yet that exact randomness, that moment of devastating causality so short, that it renders it banal in the larger, impersonal scope of the world.

It is interesting that McEwan is an atheist. Having no belief in a more powerful being, such devastating events can really be nothing else but banal, devoid of any larger meaning. A true Christian of equal talent would have written a very different book. I write that with no bias (at least for purposes of this review) in favor of one belief or the other. It is simply an observation. The book was written by McEwan and it shows why, even at a relatively early stage, he is one of our truly great authors.

20 people found this helpful

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andrea

bel libro

Reviewed in Italy on May 31, 2023

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bellissima lettura

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Amazon Customer

Excellent book, in good condition

Reviewed in Canada on February 10, 2018

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Excellent book, in good condition, delivered promptly and the perfect way to get an older book for my book club.

Vikram

Great book. Please go for it.

Reviewed in India on July 18, 2017

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Great book. Different line of story than I had expected it to be. Refreshing. I would strongly recommend it to everyone.

Pete Shields

Sublime and seeping into words

Reviewed in Australia on July 8, 2019

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My favourite book. I enjoyed getting to know Stephen and Julie and grieving for Kate. What an honour to read those words and be part of that world. All my heartfelt gratitude to you Ian.

Richard R.

Book arrived and was in good condition. As for the story

Reviewed in Spain on December 11, 2014

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Book arrived and was in good condition.

As for the story, well, this is not something the seller is responsible. So far, I am finding it a bit too descriptive for my tastes. The first chapter reminded me a bit of "The Shack".

Unfortunately, the story is not grabbing my attention.

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About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Ian McEwan

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