SOURCE: Slay, Jack, Jr. “Vandalizing Time: Ian McEwan's The Child in Time.” Critique 35, no. 4 (summer 1994): 205-18.

In the following essay, Slay examines the connections between children and the passage of time in The Child in Time, drawing attention to parallels between the loss of the protagonist's child and the theme of time as the destroyer of youth and, alternately, as a mode of recovery and rejuvenation.

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 as “Butterflies” (in which a man sexually abuses, then murders a young girl) and “Pornography” (in which a man is emasculated...