The Child in Time

One of English author Ian McEwan’s most beloved works, The Child in Time (1987) tells the story of a children’s book author whose three-year-old daughter is kidnapped. It won the Whitbread Novel Award given to exemplary works of literature by English and Irish authors. In 2017, the novel was adapted into a BBC television film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald.

A self-described “accidental” children’s book author, Stephen wakes up next to his wife, Julie, one Saturday morning in their London apartment. He lets Julie sleep in and prepares to take his three-year-old daughter, Kate, to the market. While they shop, Kate rides around in the basket of the shopping cart. In the checkout line, Stephen removes her from the cart and looks away for just a few moments as he unloads the groceries. However, when he turns back, Kate is nowhere to be seen. Initially, Stephen remains calm, believing that his daughter could not have strayed far. A sense of panic builds, as his efforts to find Kate prove fruitless. She is not in the store, nor in the parking lot, nor in the loading area of the grocery store. He searches up, down, and around the block but to no avail. Joined by other shoppers and eventually the police, Stephen canvasses the area, but it is as if Kate has simply vanished. Devastated and mortified by his own inattentiveness, Stephen returns home to deliver the tragic news to Julie.

Obsessed with finding Kate, Stephen devotes his life over the next few weeks to finding his daughter. Perhaps in a case of wishful thinking, Stephen theorizes that Kate has been kidnapped by a loving family that lost a child. He pores through newspaper reports and other records, identifying and tracking down families in the area whose child has died relatively recently. When feeling too exhausted or depressed to work on his search, Stephen crumples onto the couch with a bottle of scotch, parked in front of the television constantly tuned to the Olympic games or various brainless programs. His only form of semi-employment is as a member of the Official Commission on Child’s Care Subcommittee on Reading and Writing. The purpose of the subcommittee is to write a handbook on childcare. While he arrives at the meetings on time and stays for their duration, Stephen participates little in the way of discussion.



Meanwhile, Julie exists in a near-catatonic state, paralyzed by grief. She eventually awakens from her stasis and proceeds to clean out Kate’s room, bagging up all the items. This act of acceptance, coupled with the fact that the apartment is now rid of emotional ties, causes Kate to move out. Over the course of the book, Stephen and Julie visit one another very infrequently, their marriage effectively nullified by their shared loss.

Stephen’s only real friends are Charles Darke and his wife Thelma. A publisher who put out Stephen’s first book, Darke now works as a Cabinet Minister who has the ear and the affection of the Prime Minister. Thelma, a quantum physicist, converses with Stephen about her theories concerning the fluid and unstructured nature of time. While Stephen finds her theories ludicrous, he considers the possibility of seeing Kate again, even if he can’t stop her from being kidnapped. According to the theory, one might have the ability to travel through time but not to change what has already happened.

Stephen recalls the circumstances surrounding his first book. Originally conceived as a novel for adults, the book concerns a journeying hippie reflecting on his childhood summers. Darke convinced Stephen to publish the story as a children’s book instead. After much prodding, Stephen finally agreed. This is why Stephen describes himself as an “accidental” children’s book author.



While Stephen continues to grow inward, the lives of the people around him fall apart. Charles and Thelma move to the countryside. Some years later, Charles’ mind regresses to a childlike state, and he kills himself.

Meanwhile, Stephen too reverts to a childlike state but in a much different way. One day, he undergoes a strange transformation and finds himself as a child in the past, watching his mother and father in a pub debating whether to abort the pregnancy that will lead to Stephen’s birth. His mother sees Stephen through the window as a child and decides to keep the baby. This seems to suggest that while time travelers can indeed interact with the past, the nature of time itself is circular and so whatever changes are made have already happened on the wheel of history.

Back in the present, Stephen receives an unexpected call from Julie, who hasn’t reached out to him in months. When he finds her in the hospital, she is in labor. The pregnancy is the result of a sexual encounter they shared the last time they met. Finally able to move on after Kate’s disappearance, the two reconcile and look to the future.



According to journalist Christopher Hitchens, A Child in Time is “still, in my view, [McEwan’s] masterpiece,” even after the release of more popular and acclaimed novels.