Issue # 123
Michael Byrne
Time and the Child in Ian McEwan's
The Child in Time
It may be a commonplace of criticism to state that every great novel
is at some level about time, but the masterpieces of Modernism foregrounded
this theme in ways that still seem new. To the Lighthouse, The Sound
and the Fury, Lord Jim, Tender Is the Night, and "The Bear"
among other Modernist texts prepared the ground for the next generation's
time experimenters such as Muriel Spark, John Fowles, Kurt Vonnegut, and
Robert Coover (or even a third generation's Don DeLillo, William T. Vollmann,
Martin Amis and Richard Powers). No recent novel in this rich tradition
is as successfully obsessed with time as Ian McEwan's The Child in
Time. In this novel (winner of the Whitbread Prize), McEwan produces
a long meditation on the nature of this most inscrutable phenomenon, not
from the perspective of contemporary physics but from the emotional and
psychological responses of a man grieving over the disappearance of his
three-year-old daughter. Stephen Lewis' recovery from this time-stopping
event and his eventual re-entry into the inexorable continuum of human
time form the stage for McEwan's virtuoso performance.
The novel opens with a traffic jam - the deadest of all possible kinds
of "dead time." And although Stephen, by walking to a government
committee meeting on child-rearing, avoids being stuck in time with his
fellow Londoners, he inhabits a deader place in time than they. On a routine
trip to a supermarket he has recently suffered the profound trauma of
losing his daughter Kate (whether she has been abducted, whether she is
dead or living, will remain unexplained), and at the beginning of the
novel, Stephen has for some time stopped living in any present subsequent
to that day. Stephen's habitat is the past. In fact, the first chapter,
framed by the monotonous "bureaucratic time" of the committee,
is continually interrupted by Stephen's memories of his boyhood schoolroom,
the day of Kate's disappearance, and the days following her loss. As McEwan
debunks the notion of chronological time through the nonlinearity of his
narrative, Stephen recalls that prior to the trip to the supermarket he
and his wife Julie had planned to make love. Stephen regrets this loss
as well; he wants to recapture the moment of what was going to be "uninterrupted
time" (McEwan 10). But McEwan insists that human memory and desire
prevail against any such naive notion, that our consciousness lives as
often in the past or the future as it does in the present. The loss of
this affection between him and his wife convinces Stephen that "time...monomaniacally
forbids second chances" (McEwan 10). Unlike Jay Gatsby, Stephen does
not consciously feel that the past can be repeated, yet his memories,
daydreams and fantasies concern little else. When we first meet Stephen,
he is far from accepting the finality of life without Kate. To do so would
demand that he genuinely engage that fateful day, express his grief and
confront the future. As the novel opens, though, the only future Stephen
can conceive of is more "empty time" as the previous year devoted
to the committee has been.
At this point in the novel, memory is the medium through which Stephen
moves. He recalls his early years when he emerged as a popular author
of children's books and through his first novel, meeting and being befriended
by the influential Charles Darke. Charles and his wife Thelma act as surrogate
parents for Stephen when he spends more "forgotten time" broken
down at their home for weeks after the loss of Kate. But these memories
do not supply emotional sustenance for Stephen, nor does Stephen's memory
of his and Julie's failure to reconnect as lovers in their child-haunted
flat a mere month after the tragedy. Stephen's earlier suspicion that
the lost moment of tender lovemaking cannot be recaptured seems confirmed
by this memory. Loss and grief have robbed what balm memory might have
provided, yet Stephen obsessively clings to a past as painful as it is
vivid.
In the midst of these memories comes the astonishment of chapter three
in which Stephen journeys by train to visit Julie months after their separation
(Stephen observes architectural styles during the trip from London to
the suburbs that signal a movement from the past to the present). Having
embarked some distance from her cottage, Stephen walks through a field
of wheat, and while doing so, he loses his sense of time. He emerges from
the field near a pub located in what he perceives to be an earlier, more
rustic English landscape. Here he approaches the pub's window and sees
a young man and woman talking over their drinks. Slowly he realizes that
he is looking at his parents at some point in time before his birth. He
senses something else in their pantomime and recoils, fleeing from an
"infant despondency" (McEwan 65). Later, as if awakening from
a nightmare, Stephen arrives at Julie's where she cares for him and where
they later make love. However, the "moment of tenderness" eludes
them again as unspoken sadness drives them apart at the chapter's end.
According to the critic David Lodge, "Most examples of radical experiment
with narrative chronology...seem to be concerned with crimes, misdemeanours
and sins" (79). Like one who has witnessed a criminal act, Stephen
is clearly appalled by what he has intuited at the pub, but not until
four chapters later is the conversation in the pub revealed: Stephen's
parents have been discussing whether or not to terminate the pregnancy
that will result in their only child. Stephen has experienced the universal
desire to return to the security of his mother's womb, only to be shaken
by the knowledge of what a precarious state that truly was. The past,
rather than providing a stable, predetermined course of events, is demonstrated
to be as contingent and unpredictable as the future. Stephen, very much
the "child" in this scene, flings himself upon Julie, seeking
the maternal assurances he has not found in the glimpse of his young mother.
The "time-hopping" in this chapter comes as no surprise in a
novel about time, but McEwan's naturalistic canvas would seem to promise
a rational explanation for the event. Hallucination is a distinct possibility
as Stephen has become disoriented during his walk. Later in the novel,
though, Stephen's mother will corroborate his "vision." McEwan
purposely doesn't answer the question of the pub scene's "factuality,"
and in so doing, may be implying that this kind of "time-hopping"
can actually occur. But "factuality" is itself beside the point
since the novel concerns the human response to time rather than
the nature of time in some absolute sense. Stephen's "vision"
of his parents in the pub is "real" precisely because it is
emotionally and psychologically real.
Chapter three is only the most extreme instance of the novel's temporal
wonders. In "Modern Literature and the Sense of Time," William
T. Noon asserts that "[t]he distortion of the time sense to which
our modern literature witnesses owes as much to the loss of confidence
in reason, in idea, as it does to lack of nerve in our faith" (294).
Yet throughout The Child in Time McEwan demonstrates a secular
faith in the human capacity to emotionally and psychologically manipulate
the contours of time. A number of unforgettable vignettes come to mind.
"Panic time" is drawn in the scene of Stephen's losing Kate
as time incrementally accelerates from its petty pace when Stephen first
notices that his daughter is no longer by his side, then begins to sense
that something more serious may have occurred, and, ultimately, races
frenziedly down the supermarket's aisles calling Kate's name. Later, the
scene in which Stephen survives an accident with a truck driver offers
the experience of "time stretching" as the seconds constituting
the auto accident elongate with Stephen's heightened consciousness of
a terrible physical event unfolding. Elsewhere the experience of "time
stopping" is related by Stephen's mother remembering in the minutest
detail the frozen moment when she first laid eyes on her future husband
who holds in his hands a broken clock. And in the episode of Stephen's
climbing to Charles' treehouse, the intensely present tense experience
of climbing a one hundred and sixty foot beech (making the next step correctly
consumes Stephen's thoughts) defines what it means to be "in the
moment" as consciousness of the past or the future is obliterated.
There is hardly a scene in the novel that fails to dramatize the richly
diverse human construction of time.
Stephen's friend Charles Darke dramatizes the most disturbingly complex
reaction to time. Charles is a comer in politics, having vaulted from
the world of publishing to the inner circles of the Prime Minister. He
has been drawn to Stephen since reading and publishing his first novel,
a story of childhood that eschews the sentimentality of most juvenile
fiction. Charles has been influential in Stephen's being invited to sit
on the committee on child-rearing practices, and because of their friendship,
Stephen will later become a confidante of the Prime Minister. Initially,
Charles appears to be the ultimate adult: powerful, composed, authoritative.
But he inexplicably resigns from the administration and retreats with
his wife to a countryside estate. Charles has been one of Stephen's parent
figures in the novel, one who shepherded Stephen through the empty time
after Kate's loss. Who Stephen visits in the countryside, however, is
a woodland boy: Charles has regressed to childhood in an eerie transformation.
Charles' "turning back the clock" is presented as anything but
a benignly nostalgic gesture - it is clearly half dangerous game and half
psychosis.
Charles' retreat from the adult world consolidates McEwan's other theme
in the novel - the mysterious and essential relationship between children
and their parents. In Charles' case Thelma speculates that the early death
of his mother and a cold, tyrannical father combined to deny Charles a
real childhood and created unresolvable conflicts in the adult Charles
who wants both the irresponsible freedom of childhood and the power and
prestige of a politically connected adulthood. This bifurcation of his
personality also attracts Charles to the project of overseeing the Government's
child-care guide while ensuring that its draconian portrait of correct
child-rearing pleases the Prime Minister, his authoritative surrogate
father. The Authorized Child-Care Handbook, whose maxims introduce
each chapter of the novel, reflects Charles' conflicted understanding
of the parent-child relationship, his guilt and self-recrimination. It
characterizes children as selfish and ungrateful, and childhood as a social
invention, a "disease...from which growing up is the slow and difficult
recovery" (McEwan 211). According to the handbook, parents should
be inflexible, authoritative, hard, and distant (most especially the father,
who must prepare a child for "the separations to come") (McEwan
52). But, for all its harshness, the handbook accurately reflects the
adult world's ignorance of children's real lives and natures.
Indeed, the novel's portrait of adulthood and parents is far from flattering.
The Government handbook assumes that children are imperfect adults, but
McEwan suggests that adults are failed children whose rationality (Thelma)
has replaced wonder, whose seriousness (Stephen in the woods with Charles)
has replaced playfulness, and whose guardedness (Stephen and Julie) has
replaced unconditional love. And parents come in for an even more frank
treatment. If the ideal parent is a teacher, a provider, and, most importantly,
a protector, the real parent can clearly fail at any of these roles, can
betray his own child just as the Government betrays Stephen's subcommittee
by publishing its own version of the chid-care handbook. Stephen fails
in the role of Kate's protector. This inadvertent betrayal is so painful
for him to acknowledge that he compensates by "discovering"
Kate in a grade school recess yard and throwing a sixth birthday party
for a little girl who will never show up: he will invent what he has lost.
Especially relevant in Stephen's case is the relationship between parents
and time. Parents, of course, want to see their children thrive and develop
(pass through time successfully) while at the same time they want their
children always to remain children (somehow resistant to time). Parents
are in some ways, then, the enemies of time, a foe more formidable than
they. For Stephen this parental dilemma is turned on its head. His ghost
child will always be a three-year-old slipping out of his peripheral vision
at the supermarket. For his own sanity he will have to imagine her passage
through time: the alternative is unthinkable.
As well, Stephen participates in another parental lie of the mind: what
Stephen sentimentally clings to early in the novel is the notion, supported
by his friend Charles, that childhood is a period of golden timelessness.
Darke's retreat into a second childhood is an attempt to recapture this
innocence and invulnerability (innocence being another of McEwan's recurring
fictional themes). In this delusion one's childhood becomes a temporal
miracle: the childhood day is endless; the summers, little eternities.
Stephen and Charles would claim that the child may be in time, but not
of it. Yet even though the human response to time in this novel admits
the greatest kind of variety (Thelma asserts that "Time is variable")
(McEwan 136), McEwan's point is that at no time can human existence
escape time. The child is in time and never out of it: a heartbreaking
realization for Stephen. Kate the child is gone, as her childhood will
be someday. Stephen learns this awful truth the hard way - through the
painful endurance of time after her disappearance. In these years he comes
to experience the profound ache time is capable of inflicting on a human
consciousness: the first birthday without his daughter, the first Christmas,
the slow march of ordinary days following her absence.
Yet time's other face eventually reveals itself to him. After all, the
old chestnut is true for Stephen: time becomes the medium for his recovery.
It does heal his wound, and not only by its passing. For time is also
the medium of the new life he and Julie create. When Stephen meets Julie
again in the last chapter, "meaningful time" (McEwan 251) has
passed for both of them as well as for the child growing within her. Time
the torturer has become Time the nurturer. Stephen and Julie weep together
in their acknowledgment that time has passed, that their Kate will never
reappear. This cathartic recognition allows them to imagine a future,
to have their "second chance" that Stephen earlier thought lost.
(And here, in allowing Stephen and Julie their "second chance,"
McEwan performs more temporal magic by having the past repeat itself.)
Ironically, it is this epiphanic moment that brings them closest to an
out-of-time state: "it was before the beginning of time" (McEwan
263). Like the authors of the great carpe diem poetic and novelistic
models that preceded his novel, McEwan holds out love as the only human
force equal to time. Twice upon a time, huddled around their newborn in
its first moments of life, Stephen and Julie renew their commitment to
each other and pay homage to the awful powers of Love and Time. If The
Child in Time appears to conclude optimistically, McEwan adds an ambiguous
grace note - the child's gender is never revealed. This withholding is
McEwan's final comment on his major theme: time (here the future as figured
in the child) is always contingent, always susceptible to human interpretation.
And though time is partly a human fabrication, it is also that from which
no parent or child is immune.
Works cited
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. Penguin Books: London, 1992.
McEwan, Ian. The Child in Time. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1987.
Noon, William T. "Modern Literature and the Sense of Time."
The Theory of the Novel. Ed. Philip Stevick. Free Press: New York,
1967. 280-313.
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