Published 1987 by Vintage, Penguin.
247 pages.
ISBN: 978-0099-75501-2
Grade: 5/5
Will I read more of this author: yes
Genre: Fiction,
Keywords: grief, loss of a child, government, reading, London, UK, on science, to describe time.
Stephen and Julia Lewis had their daughter Kate kidnapped 3 years ago, she disappeared from the supermarket, when her father turned for a few seconds. She has not been found since.
Stephen writes children’s books. His close friend Charles had his first book published, Charles has turned to politics and has got Stephen involved in ‘The Official Committee on Childcare’; they meet once a week to discuss stuff. Stephen uses this time for ‘mental wandering’ and that is how we get the story about the kidnapping, the divorce, the devastation and the deterioration of everyday life in London and on a lot of current affairs in society and politics.
Writings about policy and the individual; how the instinct for what was right was blurred and disappearing. There is an absolutely mad meeting about how the committee wants children to learn to read and write or not; the current method is competitive education.
Charles’s wife Thelma is a lecturer in physics on The Nature of Time. Talk on science and scientific revolution today, how nobody thinks things through (page 43) and how the ‘arts people’ are ignorant of these magnificent things of science, that they are rather proud of knowing nothing’ (page 44-45).
The is quite a lot of philosophical talk about what time is, we adults see time pass in the development of our children; but childhood is timeless; what happened to time: how duration shaped itself round the intensity of the event. did time start with the Big Bang? According to Einstein time is variable; but does that mean you can go backward in time?
It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland: "It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then; and also: Alice: How long is forever? White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”
In the book one of the characters return to childhood, I thought at first as if dementia but in the end it was different.
My thoughts: it is a very catching book, the first I read from this author. At this moment in time with the war imposed by terrorists and many kidnapped people to Gaza, this shows the devastation of the disappearance of a young child into thin air, lost, no grave to grief at. There is a lot to think about in this book, what society we want, what is the place of science and the scientific revolution that occurs all the time, but we do not understand but we absolutely should.
A Quote (page 17): This useful framework was familiar from his schooldays, from hundreds or thousands of classroom hours dedicated to mental wandering.
On the author:
Ian Russell McEwan, born 1948, is a British novelist and screenwriter. He won the Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
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