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The Child in Time | 
| Author: Ian Mcewan
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $2.97
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New (38) Used (22) from $2.97
Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 64342
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385497520
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385497527
ASIN: 0385497520
Publication Date: November 2, 1999
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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.
Product Description
Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone.
With extraordinary tenderness and insight, Booker Prize–winning author Ian McEwan takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts. The winner of the Whitbread Prize, The Child in Time is an astonishing novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Not up to scratch July 31, 2008
J. PARKER (Phoenix, AZ, USA)
I've read lots of Mr. McEwan's work, and every other novel is brilliant. Unfortunately, this is the Other novel. Atonement and Enduring Love were wonderful, Saturday a disappointment, and Amsterdam a disaster. This is the worst yet. The plot centers around the kidnapping of the main character's young daughter and his reaction to the tragedy. There is no significant character development, a gratuitous Prime Minister, a suicide sweetly explained away by the deceased's wife, and pages of rambling, seemingly pointless prose. There is a certain redemption in the last few pages, but that does not offset the pain of the middle part. Try one of his other works instead.
 A good early work May 4, 2008
kirlena walsh (australia)
The two key themes of A Child in Time are contained in the title, which is a kind of a pun on the baby that arrives in time to save the marriage. There is the stolen child lost in time, Kate; Steven tries to keep her in time, to give her imaginary growth, but fails. Julie has to learn to allow her to be lost to a past time yet still loved in present time. There is the child out of time - Steven's revisiting his own former self in some supernatural experience. There is the fictional child of his novels, children forever children in the constructed world that fiction allows. And there is the adult who wants to return to the naivety and lack of responsibility of childhood, and actually attempts a real regression to that level. His attempt is catastrophic. The character Charles raises the issue of time quite early in the novel, when he comments that to children, there is no time; their world is somehow played out with little awareness of the passing of time or of a real future. The comment: "In every child there is a hidden adult and in every adult there is a hidden child", plays with changes in time's forward arrow. Charles's desire to return to the innocence and insouciance of childhood, we are told by Thelma, is a widespread problem amongst adults; it is accentuated as pathology in Charles.
The novel, as most of McEwan's novels, travels to and fro in time with back flashes interspersing the narrative of the present, and a future never out of sight. Although the novel returns in time, and although Steven's memory does also, McEwan constantly reminds us that our present is the result of past decisions, past important moments of choice that cannot be retrieved or extirpated. Time travels on, and the missing Kate has to find her own place in that arrow of time in a way that will allow the parents to move on without her, yet with loving memories of her.
Within this thematic, there are some lovely moments: I think it the only work of McEwan that has brought me to actual tears. But the tears are momentary. It has none of the poignancy of On Chesil Beach, or the enduring sense of loss or tragedy - but then, it is not a tragedy, so that is hardly surprising. The style is recognisably and wonderfully McEwan even while it lacks the more refined and subtle skills he has at his disposal today (the original copyright is 1987). Part of his lack of skill is in his methodology - his actual story telling. He is not able, as he is now, to get as expertly inside his characters and quarry their psychological depths.
For me, his greatest failure centred on the actual stealing of Kate. I find it barely credible. I also find the failure to follow the psyches or the conversations of the couple at this time to be frustrating. He can't quite deal with the magnitude of his own plot at this point, and steps too far back from both action and characters for me. There are unexplained gaps in plot, jumps in logic, presumptions and omissions that stretch the reader's belief.
I would not recommend it to anyone as their first McEwan, and I would certainly not recommend it to anyone as a marvel in its own right. Neither would I criticise it as a failed attempt. I would love to see what the more mature McEwan could do today with the same theme, but even the less experienced version indicates enormous promise, and is a pleasure to read. The disappointment occurs because we now know he can do better.
Introspective March 18, 2008
Julie Merilatt (Chicago, IL)
This is the eighth book of McEwan's that I have read, and it was not among my favorites. This was probably McEwan's most introspective novel so far, but I found myself getting bored with Stephen's thoughts. I enjoyed the plotline involving the disappearance of his daughter and how that tragedy affected his relationship with his wife. I liked his reflection on how he became a children's writer, but I thought the whole relationship with his publisher Charles and his wife a bit strange. Charles' wife's ramblings about Time were uninteresting, as was Stephen's work with the committee. I typically fly through McEwan, but certain parts of this one just had me stuck.
While the title has many levels aside from Stephen's missing daughter, there were layers that I thought seemed irrelevant. If you prefer the more introspective McEwan novels, like Saturday, then you'd enjoy The Child in Time. This did not have the shock value of The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers, or the epic novelty that made Atonement a huge success, but it's still McEwan through and through.
 A wonderful mix of passion, introspection, and contemporary commentary January 25, 2008
Mondegreen (Lexington, KY United States)
McEwan manages to take the theme of a kidnapped child and turn it into a story of courage, love, and hope, without dredging it in sentimentality and triteness. Not as immersed in irony as is ON CHESIL BEACH, it nevertheless manages to leave a lasting impression both as a story and a well-written novel.
Perfectly rendered January 16, 2008
Elizabeth C. Jones (Chapel Hill, NC United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I see I'm not alone in loving Ian McEwan's books. I'm working my way through them all, but "The Child In Time" is one to stop and savor. As has been said by many others, McEwan's novels often revolve around protagonists who go through a trial or trauma not of their own making, and the ways in which they reach resolution or some sort of eventual peace. Many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, whatever the circumstances. And it does appear that Stephen and Julie will never reconcile once their small daughter, Kate, is abducted from a supermarket checkout line under her father's nose, in less time than it takes to say it. After the loss of Kate and a lengthy and fruitless search for her, the book becomes largely Stephen's story. As is often the case, each parent grieves differently, and their manners of grief cannot coexist. But even while Julie is absent, her presence remains strong. She is never far away from Stephen or the reader. To say more would not be fair to the first-time reader. But the ending seems appropriate and is very moving. I, for one, did not see it coming.
It seems that few authors writing today are especially confident in their storytelling abilities and their readers' interest in or willingness to stay with them through complex, multi-layered narratives. McEwan isn't like that, and because he is so justifiably certain of his gifts, he spends leisurely, lengthy passages on characters and settings which don't -- at first blush -- seem to have any real function in the plot. But they always do, and finding out what these elements mean, and how they lead to the resolution of McEwan's novels, is part of what makes his writing so enjoyable. He doesn't labor over details, and yet I feel as though I know what his characters look and sound like, what their houses are like. I can feel the rain and smell the flowers in the gardens.
McEwan's fascination with science almost always plays a part in his stories; Thelma, a secondary character in this novel, is a physicist, and I expect she sounds like a real one. (I don't know any.) It is always the role of McEwan's scientists to provide tangible, mathematical proof of the emotional stages his characters are going through. Time either renews or destroys, but it doesn't stand still. As long as this remains so, (and it is Thelma's job in "The Child in Time" to remind Stephen of this), Ian McEwan's subject matter will remain infinite.
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