A Child in Time by Ian McEwan

A bit of time has passed since I finish this book, so this post is likely to be more general and significantly less detailed than I hope for my other posts to be. I would imagine that this post will be updated at a later time after I reread (which I can almost guarantee will happen).

Let me begin with a bit of a disclaimer: I adore everything that I've ever read that Ian McEwan has written. I loved Atonement, which, I must admit, made me hate the movie. When I am in love with a "real" literature kind of a book, I can't stand that some movie producer/screenplay writer (including the author him/herself...I know, I'm weird) would think to take out that part of the book when they turned it into a movie, which is probably why I got so angry at the Twilight movie. I adored Amsterdam, for reasons that I'm not really sure of. And I adored A Child in Time.

McEwan's descriptions and language slay me every time. I love that he goes deep into his characters minds, particularly when talking about emotions. It makes him masterful at the love story...and was this a love story. The basic element of the novel was the story of a couple whose child gets stolen from a grocery store when Stephen, the father, takes her shopping one day. It recounts how the relationship is fundamentally changed as a result of their loss. The pulling and pushing that their shared, albeit different, experiences have on each of them and the effects that this has on their marriage. Early in the book, they decide to separate, but the love is still there, pulling them together and pushing them apart at the same time because they are constantly worried about the other's needs and wants in the situation. The ending is just plain beautiful and full of so much hope despite everything that the two had been through. The book could have easily fallen flat with another author, but McEwan takes so much time on the supposedly "mundane" elements of life (Stephen's involvement in meetings about children's education in Britain come to mind here) and makes the reader realize that there is always more there than meets the eye. On the surface Stephen seemed to be coping with his daughter's disappearance well, but since the reader can see and feel Stephen's real emotions, he/she knows better.

McEwan also uses the story to play with other things too, namely time. One of the most climactic points in the book is when Stephen's face appears to his youthful mother in a restaurant as she decides whether or not to abort a baby...him. His mother sees the grown man's face in the window, even though he has not yet been born. McEwan also describes Stephen's seeming emotional breakdown when he sees his own parents in the restaurant on his way to visit his wife in the countryside, prompting him to elicit the story from his mother when he visits. In addition to this vignette, McEwan also uses Stephen's friends to play with theories of time; his friends, a couple, consist of a physicist who studies theories of time and her husband who, during the span of the novel, begins to revert to his childlike persona, eventually ending in his suicide when his attempts to return to childhood fail. As usual, McEwan mixes the more theoretical elements of his novel with a fantastically moving story that most readers can appreciate.

My rating: 9.5/10