Controversial intellectual Christopher Hitchens called The Child In Time Ian McEwan's literary masterpiece. Like the majority of McEwan's work, it is both sombre and melancholy at its heart, and tells the story of children's book author Stephen and his wife Julie two years after the kidnapping of their only child, Kate, who was three at the time, Stephen feels responsible for the kidnapping largely because Kate was snatched from a grocery store whilst she was with him, doing their weekly shopping. Stephen's momentary distraction meant that Kate was out of his sight for just a moment, but in that moment, everything changed.
The book's main theme is grief, and in Stephen's case, an almost rejection of it. It is not until he accepts that Kate has gone that Stephen allows himself to grieve for her at all. There is also a great deal of analysis about the ways in which Stephen and Julie's marriage disintegrates after the kidnapping and the way in which this mirrors what happens in their individual lives as well. This is an interesting study in human nature and our tendency to need to attribute blame for every event that occurs, and it is noteworthy that in many real life cases of child abduction or murder many of the parents of snatched children end up in divorce because even if blame is not verbalized or expressed, it is nonetheless felt, and a powerful undercurrent that can upset the calmest of marital waters.
McEwan also theorizes in this novel that time is a relative concept. He believes himself that this is a story about time travel in that at varying stages in the book he appears as both parent and child; the fact that Kate will forever be a three year old child underpins this theory.
A Child in Time was the recipient of the Whitbread Novel Award in 1987 and eleven years later he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam. His original passion was for writing gothic novels, and his writing is always faintly ghostly in feeling. McEwan's most well-known work is his 2001 novel Atonement which was adapted into a movie starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. Although The Child In Time was not adapted for the big screen, it did make it to the small screen when the BBC commissioned a made-for-television movie in 2017, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald.
Awarded a CBE by the Queen, McEwan was featured on both The Times list of the fifty greatest post-war British writers and the one hundred most influential people in British culture, coming in at a very respectable number nineteen.
