Heartbeats the Child in Time

By R.Z. Sheppard

Ian McEwan's unerring prose and godly powers of awareness have made him one of the best of Britain's youngish novelists, a distinguished group that includes Martin Amis, A.N. Wilson and Julian Barnes. But the 39-year-old author of In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden and First Love, Last Rites offers something extra, what might be called the McEwan effect. It is the giddy sense that given sufficient time and megabytes, an experience could be parsed into an infinite number of verbal and emotional moments.

The trick is to suggest this possibility with precision and economy. The Child in Time does so brilliantly, from the moment Stephen Lewis realizes his three-year-old daughter is missing from a supermarket check-out: "The lost child was everyone's property. But Stephen was alone. He looked through and beyond the kindly faces pressing in. They were irrelevant. Their voices did not reach him, they were impediments to his field of vision. They were blocking his view of Kate. He had to swim through them, push them aside to get to her. He had no air, he could not think. He heard himself pronounce the word stolen, and the word was taken up and spread to the peripheries, to passersby who were drawn to the commotion."

Years after Kate Lewis is kidnaped, Stephen, a successful children's book writer, recalls the instant and thinks he was vaguely aware of a figure in a dark coat, "the weakest suspicion brought to life by a desperate memory." The ache of Kate's loss is sustained throughout the book. She never returns.

Eventually Lewis and his wife Julie bear their grief in different directions: she to a country cottage to live in solitude and play her violin, he no farther than the couch to numb himself with television and Scotch. He stirs periodically to walk to Whitehall, where he is a desultory member of a government subcommittee on, of all things, child development.

McEwan bridges the chasm between private anguish and public policy with a death-defying story, inventive, eventful and affirmative without being sentimental. Entwined with the Lewises' tragedy is the tale of Stephen's friend Charles Darke, a former editor and, as a junior minister, author of a hard-nosed government manual, The Authorized Child-Care Handbook ("Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with"). His sad fate is that his political ambitions conflict with a longing to chuck it all and live in rural, childlike innocence. Longing wins, and Darke moves to a Suffolk woods where he dons short pants, carries a slingshot and spends his days in a tree house atop a 160-foot beech. He is quite mad. His physicist wife explains the split between his secret existence and his official report: "It was his fantasy life that drew him to the work, and it was his desire to please the boss that made him write it the way he did."

That Darke's boss is an unnamed and perhaps female Prime Minister of Britain is not cause for broad winks. Many of the plot turns in the novel may seem improbable and even fanciful, but the feelings expressed by the characters and their sense of time (running up, running down and running out) are, without exception, genuine. There is nothing titillating or vulgar about the PM's confession of missing Charles Darke because of loving him. And McEwan's humor is never simply topical. "I can't go anywhere alone," says the government leader of the impossible romance. "Bodyguards apart, I have to take the nuclear hotline, and that means at least three engineers. And an extra driver. And someone from Joint Staff." "Disarm," Stephen urges, "for the sake of the heart." One should not be ashamed to read this astonishing book for the same reason.