The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Time is variable. [...] There's no absolute, generally recognized 'now' [...] [T]ime as liquid, time as a complex envelope with points of contact between all moments."

It is rather obvious that a literary work of art - any work of art, for that matter - exists only as long as it is understood by the readers. It may be less obvious that the interpretation (the understanding) of said literary work of art is created dynamically in the act of reading. Different readers will interpret a book differently. Whenever in a review I use a phrase like "the central message of the novel is..." I mean "for me the central message of the novel is..." And it is perfectly natural that other readers interpret the novel's message differently. Moreover, to me it is obvious that books which can be interpreted in many different, divergent ways tend to be better than books whose message is understood in the same way by most readers; the latter just being propaganda. And what really matters the most is - of course - how well the book is written.

By these criteria The Child in Time (1987) is an excellent novel. It is indeed very well written and it offers a reader an extensive buffet of reasonable interpretations to pick from. That the novel is about the meaning of time is obvious. From the plethora of possible readings I select the one interpretation that I like the most: the human time is the never-ending circle of birth and death in which the beginning and the ending are distinguishable only for particular people - who then begin or cease to exist - but they are just two arbitrary points on the immutable cycle.

Stephen Lewis, a popular author of children's books, lost his three-year old daughter two years ago: she disappeared, kidnapped, from a grocery store. The grief moves Stephen and his wife Julie apart. He is still on the watch for a five-year old girl and Julie has moved out and lives alone. This personal story is set in a somewhat dystopian frame of post-Thatcher England toward the end of the 20th century, which is in the future from the author's perspective. Stephen is a member of the Reading and Writing Subcommittee of the Official Commission on Child Care and, unwillingly, participates in bureaucratic attempts at social engineering performed by the government. His best friend, Charles, once a government minister, suddenly resigns and - as we learn later - dramatically changes his lifestyle, thus violating the usual linearity of time.

Stephen is in occasional contact with Julie and finally decides to visit her. On the way to her place he has an earth-shattering experience, a vision during which time does not behave as expected: it is not "marching from left to right, from the past through the present to the future." These are extremely captivating passages written in stunning prose: I read the three pages several times. Months later, after having to deal with Charles' problems with time, Stephen has yet another epiphany masterfully described by Mr. McEwan:

"He had a premonition, followed instantly by a certainty, [...] that all the sorrow, all the empty waiting, had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable."

The end point meets the beginning point - there is a contact between two moments - and the time closes one cycle to begin another one.

This is one of the most thought-provoking novels I have ever read and my rating would certainly be higher if not for the redundant dystopian thread, the excesses of heavy symbolism, and way too explicit nudging the readers' attention to various aspects of time.

Four and a quarter stars.




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