The Child in Time (1987) is the book that made me start to take Ian McEwan seriously. I had read his first three books, the short story collections, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and first novel The Cement Garden (1978), and found them gripping. I was about 21 at the time and, as it now seems, quite innocent. I thought his stories, though powerful, were a bit of a cheat. Many of his characters were rapists, killers, pathetic specimens of humanity, solipsists. It seemed to me at the time that his focus on abnormal psychology was an evasion of the more urgent and challenging problems of the normal kind. I didn’t read his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers (1981) until years later, though it was shortlisted for the Booker in the same year as Midnight’s Children, The White Hotel and Loitering with Intent as well as books by Molly Keane and Doris Lessing.

The film The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), scripted by McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, is what started to change my mind. The story of a cynical, opportunistic journalist who wants to sleep with a researcher played by the singer Charlie Dore but instead ends up sleeping with her mother, a socialist historian, it looks at the ways in which news media distort facts and mislead the public. The film is set at the time of the Falklands war and the journalist is writing a revisionist (from a Conservative point of view) book about the Suez crisis. It appealed to me that McEwan seemed to have written something more unambiguously political than I had seen from him before, so when The Child in Time appeared a few years later I was favourably disposed to the comment on the paperback from Sheila MacLeod’s Guardian review: “This is the McEwan you and I have been waiting for”.

Published in 1987, the novel is a mildly dystopian fiction set in the 1990s. The Thatcher government, or its continuation under new leadership, has continued to make life worse (to varying degrees) for most of the citizenry. Licensed beggers are strictly regulated and the government is about to issue an officially Authorised Childcare Handbook, short excerpts from which appear at the top of each of the book’s nine chapters, like this:

Childcare writers of the post-war era sentimentally ignored the fact that children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival. (p. 155)

The handbook is supposedly being assembled from the reports of various subcommittees. The protagonist, Stephen Lewis, an author of children’s books, is on the subcommittee on Reading and Writing. He has been appointed to the subcommittee at the instance of his friend and former publisher, Charles Darke, who left publishing to become a Conservative MP and subsequently a favourite of the Prime Minister. It was Charles who had persuaded an extremely reluctant Stephen to position is first novel, Lemonade, as a book for children. Its success “generated a tax bill that two years later made it a virtual necessity to publish his second novel as a children’s book too” (p. 34).

Late in the story, Stephen learns that the work of the various subcommittees is to be scrapped: the final draft of the handbook has already been written, largely by Charles. Stephen is surprised that Charles — whom he has taken to be more an opportunist than an ideologically committed Tory, and whom he knows to have yearned for what he saw as the freedom of childhood — should have written an authoritarian text on the subject. Charles’s wife, Thelma, explains:

The Prime Minister invited him, which in that world means ordered him, to write a shadow Childcare manual, the one there’s been all this fuss about. Charles and the Prime Minister worked on it together. He was being fancied, I mean sexually fancied. He pretended not to notice he was making a killing. He was repelled, but he couldn’t help flirting. He wanted to get on, he couldn’t stop himself wanting that. (p. 201)

But at the same time as wanting to get on, the adult Charles has always wanted to revert to childhood. As Thelma tells Stephen: “It wasn’t an eccentric whim. It was an overwhelming fantasy which dominated all his private moments” (p. 200). Charles saw childhood as appearing tantalizingly to be almost outside time. While persuading Stephen that Lemonade should be sold as a book for children, he says:

“… talk to a ten-year-old in mid-summer about Christmas. You could be talking to an adolescent about his retirement plans, his pension. For children, childhood is timeless. It’s always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up …’ there’s always an edge of disbelief — how could they ever be other than what they are? …” (pp. 32–3)

As Charles sees it, the strength of Stephen’s first novel is that it communicates with children, “across the abyss that separates the child from the adult” with the message that “they are finite as children” (p. 33). Childhood won’t last — though Charles will make a doomed attempt to restore his own.

Charles’s wife is a scientist, a physicist, whose thesis was about “ — as far as any gossip columnist could tell — the nature of time” (p. 32). Stephen has often asked her to explain current theories on the subject but has always come away baffled. Then he has an experience that appears inexplicable (we’ll come to that) and his questioning of Thelma becomes more urgent. Having repeated something she’s told him before, about the “many universes” hypothesis, Thelma goes on:

“… Then there are physicists who find it convenient to describe time as a kind of substance, an efflorescence of undetectable particles. There are dozens of other theories, equally potty. They set out to smooth a few wrinkles in one corner of quantum theory. The mathematics are reasonable enough in a local sort of way, but the rest, the grand theorising, is whistling in the dark. What comes out is inelegant and perverse. But whatever time is, the commonsense, everyday version of it as linear, regular, absolute, marching from left to right, from the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a tiny fraction of the truth …” (p. 117)

Having assured him that physics, “still a divided subject” (p. 118), can’t help him with his puzzle, Thelma begins to expatiate on the possibility that a higher order of theory might emerge, citing David Bohm. “It was at this point that Thelma livened up and Stephen began to understand less (p. 118). (Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) is one of the three books that McEwan refers to in his Acknowledgements.)

Stephen’s strange experience had occurred while he was walking through the countryside, on his way to visit his wife Julie, who had withdrawn to a remote cottage in Kent following the disappearance, presumed abduction, of their three-year-old daughter Kate. Passing a pub named The Bell, he had looked through the window and seen a young couple that were recognizably his own parents some 40 years earlier, earnestly discussing something over a beer. Much later his mother will tell him that she was pregnant with him when they were in that pub and had just resolved to have an abortion, convinced that his father wasn’t ready to have a child. The appearance at the pub window of someone she instinctively knew to be her own child had dissuaded her from terminating the pregnancy. So it seemed as if Stephen had gone back in time to preserve his own existence.

He went on to Julie’s cottage where they were not immediately reconciled but (as Stephen did not find out until nine months later) they conceived a second child who would in the end bring them back together. Kate’s disappearance, while at the local supermarket with her father, happens near the beginning of the novel. It obviously devastates both her parents and their marriage. They never find out what happened to her and neither does the reader. On first reading I was hugely impressed by McEwan’s willingness to confront such a horrifying occurrence, and to show us the effect on Stephen and his reaction to it.

The novel brings together a number of themes related to children and childhood, and the “nature” of time: the loss of three-year-old Kate, Stephen’s accidental career as a children’s author, Charles’s regression, the Prime Minister’s direct involvement in an official childcare handbook and, of course, Stephen’s passive, unintentional intervention in his mother’s long-ago dilemma. There’s a parallel between Stephen’s temporary loss of Julia and Thelma’s permanent loss of Charles to rural retreats, yet it may seem that some of these themes are only loosely connected. That doesn’t strike me as a weakness in the novel, but rather an indication of time’s ungraspable quality.

I had decided to write about The Child in Time together with another of McEwan’s novels, and had settled on Atonement (2001) as the companion piece. As I reread both novels in the past two weeks (The Child in Time for about the third time, but the first since the late 80s, and Atonement for the first) it struck me that each of them would pair better with a different book. The Child in Time strikes me as having a strong family resemblance to Enduring Love, about which I’ve written in this newsletter before. Both novels open with a horrific, shocking incident involving a child. That incident (and, in the case of the later book, what follows from it) leads to the estrangement of the protagonist from his wife/partner. At the end of the novel they’re reconciled. And Stephen’s unreasonable self-justifying recriminations against Julie’s inaction while he spends every day fruitlessly showing Kate’s picture to strangers have something of the same flavour as Joe’s against Clarissa in Enduring Love:

He suspected — and it turned out later he was correct — that she took his efforts to be a typically masculine evasion, an attempt to mask feelings behind displays of competence and organisation and physical effort. The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. They had discovered a degree of mutual intolerance which sadness and shock made insurmountable. (p. 24)

The book I think would best make a pair with Atonement is Sweet Tooth, about which I’ve already written in conjunction with The Innocent on the basis that these last two are spy stories. But Atonement and Sweet Tooth resemble each other in ways I hadn’t noticed before, probably because, until last week, I had read the former only once. Both books feature novels whose publication must be delayed by many years, in one case because the litigious model for one of the characters is still alive, in the other because of the Official Secrets Act. Both of these novels-within-a-novel fictionalize actual events — “actual”, that is, in the fictional world of the novel which encloses it — and change the endings. Sweet Tooth can be thought of as the actual novel it refers to, its publication delayed for 40 years, whereas Part II of Atonement is part of the final, posthumous work of its protagonist, Briony Tallis. And so on.

Atonement is probably McEwan’s best regarded novel and biggest hit, whereas my impression is that Sweet Tooth was poorly received. Ironically, my initial estimation of the two books was the other way around: I enjoyed Sweet Tooth’s playfulness and the puzzling intricacy of its plot, while I found Atonement tiresome and frustrating, which is why I never reread it until now. But I think I made a mistake: this time I liked as well as admired Atonement. I haven’t quite been able to recover the state of mind that led me to be to be so dismissive back in the early 2000s, but I think I was partly misled by the publisher’s description on the back of the paperback.

Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

The first time around, I took that at face value. This time, I’m fairly sure that the book itself, as distinct from the publisher’s description, does not indicate that Briony spent “the rest of her life trying to atone”.

When she was 13 in 1935, and already set on being a writer of fiction and drama, Briony opened and read a love-letter that she had been asked to deliver to her older sister, Cecilia. That, and her misinterpretation of two scenes that she witnessed the same day, led her to jump to a conclusion when her 15-year-old cousin Lola was raped. She was in no doubt who the attacker must be. She identifies him to the investigating detective.

“You saw him then.”

“I know it was him.”

“Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.”

“Yes, I saw him.” (p. 181)

She indeed saw the rapist but it was too dark for her to make out his features. Briony sticks to her lie with catastrophic consequences, the first of which is the conviction and imprisonment of the wrong man. It gets worse from there.

About a decade earlier, I had read some criticism by A S Byatt (I’m afraid I can’t remember where) in which put great stress on the “fictive” character of fiction. I’m pretty sure she quoted B S Johnson who maintained that “Telling stories is telling lies.” It seemed to me that to say that fiction was fictive and therefore not truthful seemed a tautology and too obvious to be worth making a fuss over. With that in mind, I imitated the 13-year-old Briony and jumped to conclusions. I took it for granted that McEwan was making much the same point, that all Briony’s many attempts to rewrite her, Cecilia’s and Robbie’s past couldn’t undo what had actually happened to the characters.

But on rereading I think I see that this is not at all what’s going on. It’s only shortly before her own death, in her late 70s, that Briony finally attempts to write a different, happier ending, and she does it not because she imagines that it could undo what is done, but simply because it’s the best, as a writer, she can do. This isn’t “telling stories is telling lies”, nor is it the opposite. It’s something else again. I may attempt to say what some other time.

Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do that to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. (p. 371)

Editions: The Child in Time, Picador paperback, 1988; Atonement, Vintage paperback 2002. An ellipsis at the beginning or end of a quotation is added, otherwise ellipsis is original. All emphasis is original.