The Child in Time is a novel by Ian McEwan. The story concerns Stephen, an author of children’s books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate. It won the Whitbread Novel Award for 1987 and has sometimes been declared one of Mc Ewan’s greatest novels.
About The Child in Time in brief
The Child in Time is a novel by Ian McEwan. The story concerns Stephen, an author of children’s books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate. The book deals with the theory that time is relative, and can be fluid and unstructured. At the very core of the novel is the \”child in time\” — Stephen himself — appearing to his mother as a child’s face at a window. It also explores the way both Stephen’s and Julie’s lives disintegrate after Kate’s disappearance, and how an unexpected event at the very end of the book may bring them back together. It won the Whitbread Novel Award for 1987 and has sometimes been declared one of Mc Ewan’s greatest novels, but others criticize the book as heavy-handed.
The novel’s certainty that its values are the right ones, the ones that are safe to be seen with, makes it particularly exasperating to anyone who has sponged on it, like myself, who sponges on it like a sponging midwife. The novel thinks it knows the answer and offers the answer to the question: what may be coming to term in the womb of time in the term of time? The book ends with Stephen finding out Julie had got pregnant during his visit through their emotional tryst, and her giving birth to a baby girl, who is later confirmed to have been Stephen’s daughter. The child in time is later seen by Stephen as a young couple in a pub, before they were married, an event that is later confirm to have happened by his parents.
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This page is based on the article The Child in Time published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
