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Synopsis
Through following the main character, Stephens, attempts to come to
terms with the loss of his daughter, Kate, and the break up of his marriage
to Julie, The Child in Time is a subtle dystopia that deals with love, loss,
childhood, adulthood, political control and the nature of time.
Themes
The nature of time: going back in time, the past, the future, the
redemptive power of time.
Children: childcare, the search for the childhood self, conception
and birth, the loss of childhood
Parents: authority and responsibility
Memory
Illusion
Politics (it is a subtle dystopia. Look at the way society has changed.
Consider Thatcherism too.)
Loss of hope/ grief/ healing/
head, pressing tight into the face and obscuring the mouth.
Stephen knelt down. (Pg. 94)
The emphasis on paternity throughout the novel highlights Stephens
Oedipal anxieties, which he overcomes by usurping the role of parent and
consolidating his position as both father and son.
A Feminist Interpretation
McEwan is often described as a feminist writer despite the macabre and
often sordid nature of his earlier works. There is an emerging maturity in
his novels and a growing awareness of the feminist cause, which may be
partly due to the influence of his wife, Penny Allen. McEwan writes:
After writing The Imitation Game- having escaped the label of
being the chronicler of adolescence- I was then suddenly the male
feminist, which really made me shrinkI didnt want to be used as
a spokesman for womens affairs. I didnt want to be a man
appropriating womens voices. (NI 176)
However, many feminists have accused McEwan of exactly that complaint,
appropriating womens voices. Some claim that he even goes so far as
to try and usurp the womans role. This is linked to the Freudian
interpretation where critics read the delivery of the lorry driver and
Stephens role as mid-wife and instigator of his childs birth as an attempt
to take on the power of the woman and supplant her. They attribute this to
misogyny and insecurity.
Other critics are more willing to accept that the road out of patriarchy is a
long one and that The Child in Time seeks to be honest about the envy
of men for womens power and that the message of the story is clearly
that of a journey not yet completed. There is hope at the end of the novel
when the babys sex is not yet conferred but as the moon (which
represents the feminine) declines and the closeted family is made to open
up its doors to society (in the form of the midwife) the limiting boundaries
of gender and the expectations of the outside world are about to become
imposed so that this utopian moment will not last.
Thelma too recognises that patriarchy has had its day and her views on
quantum mechanics as a feminising principle to make science softer, less
arrogantly detached, more receptive in participating in the world it wanted
to describe(Pg. 39) seem to suggest that there is hope for the future,
although some critics may object to her portrayal as an earth mother who
is trying to instil gentler manners and a sweeter disposition on Science
as an unhelpful stereotype.
A Marxist Interpretation
My prose tended to remain private. I always wanted to broaden it,
find the fruitful ground where private and political [could exist]
together (Ian McEwan)
A Scientific Approach
Despite McEwans assertion that the achievements of science and
scientific researchers rank with the work of Shakespeare and the painting
of the Sistine Chapel many critics have shied away from using scientific
theory as a way of approaching the themes of the novel. Thelmas lecture
on quantum physics can be read as an explanation of McEwans views on
Time, Consciousness and the seemingly random nature of the Universe.
We are told by Thelma that,
Time is variable. We know it from Einstein who is still our bedrock
here. In relativity theory time is dependent on the speed of the
observer. What are simultaneous events to one person can appear
in sequence to another. Theres no absolute, generally recognised
now. (Pg. 116)
Thus before Einstein people considered time to be the same for everyone
and thought it was meaningful to talk about two spatially separate events
happening at the same time. Einsteins Theory of Relativity shows us that
our conception of linear time is flawed and that the perspective of the
observer is fundamental. This, coupled with Thelmas explanation of the
backward movement of time provides an interpretation of Stephens
experience at The Bell and his near death experience on the motorway
as something more than mere fantasy sci-fi. McEwan is instead attempting
the literary equivalent of Thelmas scientific utopia of, finding a
[mathematical] language for the indivisibility of the entire universe
In order to understand the significance of quantum physics to the novel
some of the basic concepts should be explored. Thelma describes to
Stephen how,
Something could be a wave and a particle at the same time; how
particles seemed to be aware of each other and seemed in
theory at least- to communicate this awareness instantaneously
over immense distances
Newton assumed that light was made of particles but in the 19 th Century
Young realised from observing interference fringes that light was in fact a
wave. However, further research revealed that in fact light was made up of
single particles (photons) that despite showing no evidence of any cooperation with each other performed like waves due to entirely
probabilistic behaviour. One explanation of this is called the Many Worlds
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and is explained by Thelma as:
The world dividing every infinitesimal fraction of a second into an
infinite number of possible versions, constantly branching and
proliferating, with consciousness neatly picking its way through to
create the illusion of a stable reality (Pg. 115)
This too provides a scientific explanation of Stephens hallucination but is
also a poignant metaphor for Kate, the eponymous Child in Time.
Stephen keeps her alive in an alternative reality where she continues to
grow and Without the fantasy of her continued existence he was lost,
time would stop. He was the father of an invisible child.(Pg. 2) Thus the
essentially probabilistic universe described by quantum physics robs him
of Kate and he is forced to inhabit the alternate universe where she exists
until he is able to reconcile himself with reality.
The issue of consciousness can be explained by Heisenbergs Uncertainty
Principle and the puzzle of Schroedingers Cat. Both examples reveal how
the act of measurement fixes an object into a single point, this then
influences its essential nature. In the experiment of Schroedingers Cat a
cat is placed in a box and attached to a piece of scientific apparatus. The
apparatus in the box connects an instrument for measuring an electrons
spin to a lethal injection device. The experiment supposes that the
apparatus will kill the cat if the electrons spin is up. But according to
quantum mechanics the state of an electron is neither up nor down until
someone observes it. Therefore the cat is neither alive nor dead until
someone opens the cabinet. Thus quantum theory relies upon the
conscious action of the observer to fix a state and this provides a quasiscientific framework for the narrative action of the novel. The Child in
Time could therefore be seen to be Stephen as he is seemingly able to
move through time, to slow it down and speed it up and exist in alternate
realities merely by the conscious act of will. Through Kates kidnapping he
has been forced to recognise the undivided whole of [which] matter,
space, time, even consciousness itself but this has prevented him from
existing in the reality we understand. The ending suggests, however,
that this was merely a temporary state. The birth of the their second child
forces him to renounce his God-like state and embrace reality. Julies final
question is an acknowledgement of the world they were about to rejoin.
KJW