Vandalizing time: Ian McEwan's 'The Child in Time.'

CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, June, 1994 by Slay, Jack, Jr.

Ian McEwan's novel 'The Child in Time' is unified by the imagery of time and childhood. The novel makes use of time as a vandal and a thing to vandalize. The story concerns a missing child and the effect she has on her parents. The search for the daughter also parallels a search for the inner child of adulthood. While time has vandalized adults and obscured their inner children, time can be vandalized by the responses of characters.

At first, The Child in Time seems to be a radical departure from the violence and shock of Ian McEwan's earlier work. The novel is certainly a departure from the blood, pus, and semen that inundate his stories and previous novels; gone are the incest of The Cement Garden and the mindless violence of The Comfort of Strangers and such stories...