"The child in time" by Ian McEwan

The typical McEwan tale begins with some earth-shattering event; the novel is then devoted to chronicling the  consequences that ripple out from this. In the same way, the hero's daughter (writer of children's fiction Stephen Lewis) is stolen from a supermarket. McEwan charts the bereavement of the young parents as it destroys their relationship and their lives.

But for once McEwan has sub-plots. Why has successful Charles Darke, Stephen's publisher and best friend, suddenly left a promising ministerial career? What is the point of the subcommittee of the Official Commission on Childcare on which Stephen sits?And how did Stephen see into the past when he looked through a pub window to see his parents thirty years ago?

The book, set in a dystopian near future, attempts to portray childhood from a number of perspectives and plays with the perception of time. An adult acting like a schoolboy climbs a tree. School is an exercise in pointless regimentation. The Official Commission hears crackpot views about learning to read. Stephen buys toys for his missing child's birthday. Thelma, wife and maybe mother figure to Charles Darke, tries to explain to Stephen a modern Physics perspective on time.

I struggled to find a unifying sense to all this. Was it a retelling of the Faust legend, seen from outside the bedevilled doctor? Charles Darke (is there a clue in his name?) acquires riches, then power, then seemingly everlasting youth. Or is there a theme of everything sliding from organisation into chaos (the entropic direction for the arrow of time)? The loss of his daughter drives Stephen from a stable life to a whisky soaked squalor. There are licensed beggars on the streets. The weather is becoming worse, floods succeeding droughts. Stephen drives from gridlocked London to a forested countryside; gates are hidden by tangles of jungle. On one journey a lorry crashes. But just when things seem to have utterly disintegrated, order slowly returns. The spat at the Olympics nearly develops into nuclear war but doesn't and the Olympics continue. The lorry driver emerges from his wrecked vehicle more or less unhurt. Stephen begins to study classical Arabic and tennis as his life gets back on track.Is this another theme? Although entropy seems to increase there are localised areas in which order prevails? And death is followed by birth.

I was confused by the plot but the prose is luscious. 

Nominated for the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award.

September 2012; 220 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Ian McEwan's novels:

• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1990)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (2012)
• The Children Act (2014)
• Nutshell (2016)
• Machines Like Me (2019)
• The Cockroach (2019) (novella)
• Lessons (2022)

"Solar" by Ian McEwan

For me, McEwan is a man who writes tight dramas with a single motif: a moment when something happens and the implications of that moment ripple across the lives of the participants. Thus, Saturday, his Ulysses, which celebrates London as Joyce did Dublin, is set within the framework of a single day. Atonement traces the consequences of a single misunderstanding on an evening. Chesil Beach deals exhaustively with the effects of a premature ejaculation.

But Solar rambles. It is a sort of picaresque, a Don Quijote, except that its hero, Michael Beard, is a man who can't restrain his appetite for either sex or food and whose life is in essence messy.

Which is strange because he is a physicist whose moment of Nobelian glory came with a few sparse equations; who celebrates the economy and beauty of the succinct form of the Dirac equation. In terms of thought here is a man who has trained his mind to be amongst the sharpest in the world. But he is a fat glutton and a lecher.

He reminds me of the hero of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Perhaps he was created to encompass every single one of the seven deadly sins. As a result he is a mesmerising though comic creation. He is also fat: in a cosmological joke his belly is described as The Expanding Universe. But more properly he represents fallen mankind whose weaknesses are propelling us, headlong and blind, into the disaster of global warming.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the trip that Beard makes to Spitzbergen. On a ship frozen into the ice he confronts those obsessed with global warming. But in the Boot Room they cannot even organise their own clothes; when they lose a glove they steal someone else's. How can such flawed humans prevent ecological catastrophe?

Not to mention the fact that Beard, who becomes a prophet of the greenhouse disaster, travels everywhere by plane and reaches Spitzbergen on a petrol guzzling skimobile. His very fatness is a metaphor for the Earth: greed leading to destruction.

Other funny scenes include the irony of the climate scientist who dies after slipping on a polar bear rug; the true traveller's tale which Beard recounts only to be told he has stolen the anecdote from an urban myth; and the denunciation of Beard by feminists and relativists who claim that genes are "in the strongest sense, socially constructed" and who condemn science as 'hegemonic' (how a dominant power seeks to preserve its dominance) and 'reductionist' (something that tries to explain a system in terms of its simpler parts, which is of course the essence of science).

McEwan pokes fun at a lot of arty types and social scientists. Beard as an undergraduate at Oxford notes that arts graduates are lazier than scientists (this anti-laziness doesn't seem to last him into later life) and that, for example, English literature is not difficult (compared to Physics): he spends a week learning about Milton to impress a girlfriend and carries off the deception so well she later marries him (as the first of his five wives).

I read it quickly, though not avidly. A fun book but I think I prefer McEwan in his control freak mode.

The Guardian reviews it here.

The Telegraph reviews it here.

May 2010; 283 pages

Other McEwan novels I have read and enjoyed (with links to those that are reviewed in this blog) include:

• Atonement
• Amsterdam
• The Child in Time
• Saturday
• On Chesil Beach
• Nutshell
• Enduring Love

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God