Child in Time

I've had one thing or another by Ian McEwan on my to-read list for a wihle, but Child in Time was never one of them.  But amazon offered it cheap one day, so I grabbed it.

As a devotee of the crime genre, I'm used to books about kidnappings, but not so much kidnappings that are never solved.  (Although Tana French's In the Woods does this as well).  Instead, McEwan is more interested in charting the course of the bereft parents' grief.  I really liked this aspect of the novel -- the protagonist's arc of depression felt very real to me.

Less successful, I think, are the two sub-plots.  In one, our protagonist is on a subcomittee writing a manual on child-care which turns out to be a farce.  (Delivering a manual with chapters like "A good smack saves nine.")  These sections almost read like satire, but not particularly sharp, maybe because I don't live in the UK.  More importantly, the tone of these passages feels very jarring coming in the middle of a psychological portrait of grief.

The other major sub-plot concerns a friend who retreats into childhood rather than face his regrets about the way his life has turned out.  This story should be a nice counterpoint to the main story, giving a sort of what-might-have-been, but it never really gelled for me.

Overall, I liked the novel enough to put more McEwan on my to-read list.