The Child in Time (1987) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Stephen: an author of children's books
• Charles Darke: a politician
• Thelma: a physics professor, Charles' wife
• Julie: Stephen's wife
• Kate: Julie and Stephen's three-year-old daughter
• Douglas: Add a description of this character.
• Morley
• Parmenter
• Mrs Lewis
• Claire
• Mr Middlebrook
• Canham
• Rachael Murray
• Gott
• Joe
• Mr. Commarty: Stephen's neighbor and Arabic teacher
• The Prime Minister

Quotes edit see section history

• “... Stephen remained as always, though barely consciously, on the watch for children, for a five-year-old girl. It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken. This was a deep disposition, the outline experience had stenciled on character. It was not principally a search, though it had once been an obsessive hunt, and for a long time too. Two years on, only vestiges of that remained; now it was a longing, a dry hunger. There was a biological clock, dispassionate in its unstoppability, which let his daughter go on growing, extended and complicated her simple vocabulary, made her stronger, her movements surer. The clock, sinewy like a heart, kept faith with an unceasing conditional: she would be drawing, she would be starting to read, she would be losing a milk tooth. She would be familiar, taken for granted. It seemed as though the proliferating instances might wear down this conditional, the frail, semiopaque screen whose fine tissues of time and chance separated her from him...”

• “In the airplane an elderly lady kindly moved across to let him have the window seat so he could wave to his parents. He could see them more clearly than they could see him. They were a dozen yards from the tip of the wing, standing arm in arm just where the tarmac met the sand. They were smiling, and waving hard, then resting their arms, then waving again. The propellers on his side of the plane started up. He saw his mother turn and dab at her eyes. His father put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. Stephen was old enough to know that a period of his life, a time of unambiguous affinities, was over. He pressed his face against the window and began to cry. His Brylcreem was all over the glass. When he tried to wipe it clear his parents mistook the movement of his hand and waved again.”

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• The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right.

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• Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.

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• Was it any surprise the world was led by morons, with these enfeebled souls at the ballot box, these ordinary “folk” — a word much used by the hosts — these infants who longed for nothing more than to be told when to laugh?

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• It was the aging, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away.

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• Wasn’t that Nietzsche’s idea of true maturity, to attain the seriousness of a child at play?

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• The committee divided between the theorists, who had done all their thinking long ago, or had had it done for them, and the pragmatists, who hoped to discover what it was they thought in the process of saying it.

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• Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.

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• They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty, and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others.

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• But time — not necessarily as it is, for who knows that, but as thought has constituted it — monomaniacally forbids second chances. There is no absolute time, his friend Thelma had told him on occasions, no independent entity. Only our particular and weak understanding.

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• It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realize that however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• London
• Whitehall
• Suffolk
• Germany
• England

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Childhood and Adulthood: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by The Pigeon, and followed by Cigarettes.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Ian McEwan (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Whitbread Book Award (1987: Novel)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823.914

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › McEwan, Ian
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary