The Child in Time made me see the horror in the everyday

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/05/ian-mcewan-the-child-in-time-book

Version 0 of 1.

I was given this novel as a gift, and read it one hot summer, in an airless and very purple upstairs room in a shared house in downtown Toronto. It opens with a father who wakes on a wintry south London Saturday and takes his three-year-old daughter to the supermarket across the road. She is with him one moment and not the next – all he has done is turn to pick something up, then turn back to keep speaking to his daughter. But she is gone.

I was in my early 20s, still a student, well over a decade away from having a child of my own, but that scene – the panic, the floor dropping out of a world, the sheer randomness – got its claws in and never left. I could no longer look at children in public spaces without some corner of my brain searching out the responsible adult and measuring the distance between them, the invisible link that could be snapped at any moment. For years I didn’t remember much else about the book, apart from a general miasma of grief and creeping madness, as well as a scene in a tree – though what the tree signified I would not have been able to say.

There are other writers – Hardy and TS Eliot, and especially Coleridge and the heart-stopping beauty of his notebooks – that mean more and deeper things to me, did in fact at various points change the entire course of my life, but The Child in Time got in somewhere else, made imaginable something I had not imagined before, and could not now un-think: that in a moment, and without reason, everything can change, and change utterly.

The Child in Time made imaginable something I had not imagined before, and could not now un-think

I have always remembered the title as A Child in Time – ie the specific child who disappeared. Actually, it’s The Child in Time, and a study – at as many levels as Ian McEwan can pack in of that theme – of how prescriptions about child-rearing have changed over the centuries; how they turn back on themselves depending on prevailing politics (the protagonist, a famous children’s author, spends hours daydreaming in a committee convened by the government to produce a manual on reading and writing, and child development in general); how a child’s experience of time seems to be as an eternal discovering present; how adults yearn to regain access to that state; how having a child concertinas time, dragging a parent’s own childhood back into play while at the same time forcing a reassessment of ageing parents – “there was a harsh undoing in progress” being one of many vivid and accurate lines about this. It is no surprise, given the seriousness and earnestness with which he unpacks (and doesn’t always quite digest) all these various issues, that this book was published when McEwan’s eldest was about three. At some level he is working things out for himself, through his fiction.

Being McEwan, however, all this is interleaved, in sometimes quite schematic ways, with theoretical physics, its attempts to explain the universe and especially time’s role in the universe; how it can accelerate, decelerate and bend, how disparate moments in history might somehow also be happening simultaneously. And being McEwan, he has really done his homework, but the A in physics is sometimes too earnestly pursued.

Hence a road accident that is not there, as far as I can see, for any other reason but to show – like a worked example in a maths book – how time seems to slow or to speed up depending on what is happening. Panic expands time, he argues; boredom contracts it. (There is also a scene in which a famous novelist picks the brains of an eminent physicist – a self-reflexive description of what was obviously some of his method in writing the book, and the method that underpins many of his later novels.)

There is wisdom aplenty but also a lot of signposting: invited to lunch with the prime minister, the famous novelist indulges a “childish defiance” and chooses dirty, unkempt clothes; “the child in him was disturbed by an older woman in tears”; he stands next to a train driver on a platform and is overwhelmed by a desire for the driver to see that child in him and invite him into the cab.

McEwan is particularly fascinated by moments when these understandable instincts curdle into something more crippling and disturbing: the way, for instance, in which an adult can latch on to other adults who seem to provide the safety and freedom from responsibility that his parents once did, then feel betrayed when they turn out to be fallible – and themselves children lost in time. It turns out that the tree I remembered is in this context a crucial test. (I won’t spoil the novel for those who haven’t read it by explaining how.)

This is a novel about childhood, but also about growing up and accepting responsibility. It’s a study of family, of the unexpected ways of love and how it curls through time; how time itself curls. Much of this, frankly, passed me by when I first read it. But that moment when the child was taken – the shock; the absolute before/after. That did not.