There were a few critical comments from viewers of the
recent adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The
Child in Time which was shown on the BBC. Some found the plot ‘baffling’
with the storyline involving Stephen’s friend, the politician/publisher Charles
Darke and his regression to childhood a bit difficult to digest. It was
understandable that an hour and a half was too short a time to shoehorn all the
different threads of the original novel.
I am pleased that the political focus of the novel was not
ditched entirely. McEwan used his novel (published in 1987) as a critique of
the Thatcher government. The ‘Prime Minister’ is always referred to by this
title, the author deliberately avoiding any reference to the incumbent’s gender
(gender itself being another prominent subject debated within the novel). The
novel is set in a fictional near future, extrapolated from the social policies of
the Conservative government in the 1980s. The opening pages follow Stephen as
he weaves his way through busy London commuters, on his way to participate in a
government enquiry, supposedly contributing to the formation of a new
‘Childcare Handbook’. A young beggar draws Stephen’s attention, makes him think
of his own lost daughter, and also the moral degeneracy of the government
(which has introduced licensed begging to replace social security benefits
payments):
To give
money ensured the success of the Government programme.
Not
to give involved some determined facing away from private
distress. There was no way out.
The art of bad government was to
sever
the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct
for
what was right (McEwan 1987, 8-9).
The loss of a child is clearly a metaphor for a governmental
abuse of innocence. This opening scene establishes the interconnectedness of
the plot themes: politics, the state of a nation and different concepts of
time, all passing through the spectre of a lost child.
However, although Stephen’s missing child is often described
in ghostly, uncanny terms, sweeping down to inhabit any child on the streets of
London, the possibility that the child has been killed is never broached.
Indeed, neither the book nor its adaptation mentions even the possibility that
Kate could have been abducted by a paedophile. Instead, like the public
pronouncements of the McCanns, Stephen imagines his daughter growing up with
another family, taken as a surrogate daughter, ageing like the computer-aged
images of Maddy.
The absence of any mention of child murder and paedophilia is
itself a haunting omission from the story. The current Independent Inquiry into
Child Sexual Abuse is due in 2018 to investigate allegations of child abuse and
‘exploitation involving people of public prominence associated with
Westminster’.
The Inquiry stems from the belated public exposure of the
widespread abuses of Jimmy Saville. Allegations of high-level paedophile rings
have persisted over decades. Many of these allegations are still derided as
‘conspiracy theories’ but, it must be remembered, Saville’s crimes were also
confined to the realm of supposition through decades when he was a high profile
celebrity. More significantly, his horrific, systematic assaults were carried
out while Saville was a close friend to both politicians (most notably Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher) and members of the British Royal Family (including
Prince Charles). One of the intentions of the Inquiry is to uncover evidence of
institutions covering-up or conspiring to enable such abuses to take place. For
those members of the establishment who have recently reacted with outrage at
investigations into former public figures and politicians, it must be
remembered that Saville was allowed to destroy young people’s lives for the
whole of his life, without anyone in authority questioning his behaviour.
Allegations only seem to be taken seriously when the prominent person is dead,
or very close to it, such as the investigation into the former Prime Minister
Edward Heath:
At the time of writing, the IICSA was hearing evidence that
the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith was known by security forces such as MI5 to be
an abuser of boys. MI5 were aware that the Department for Public Prosecution
had lied to elements of the press, denying having been sent reports of
investigations into Smith’s crimes. A detective superintendent at Lancashire
Police had actually made a damning report that stated
‘It seems impossible to excuse
his [Smith’s] conduct over a considerable period of time whilst sheltering
behind a veneer of respectability.
He has used his unique position
to indulge in a sordid series of indecent episodes with young boys towards whom
he had a special responsibility.’
This report was written in 1970, the year he first ran for
office as an MP. The Inquiry heard that Margaret Thatcher would have been aware
of the allegations prior to awarding Smith a knighthood in 1988. This was the
year after The Child in Time was
published. Although Smith himself was never in Government, other investigations
and reports are uncovering strong evidence that so much abuse was known about
during the years in which McEwan was writing his novel, and the decades leading
up to it. The Conservative government Chief Whip during the leadership of Ted
Heath in the 1970s, Tim Fortescue admitted in a national BBC television
interview that they would help MPs who came to them with problems, including
with ‘small boys’:
I don’t believe McEwan had any notion of there being hidden
paedophile rings within circles of power within Westminster. But, the narrative
refers to child abuse of a different kind, with the Government creating their
own ’Authorised Childcare Handbook’ which promotes an authoritarian,
disciplinarian approach to bringing-up children. The author of this handbook is
discovered to be Stephen’s friend Charles Darke. His retirement from politics
to live in the countryside, where he can play at a ‘Just William’ cliché of
childhood, symbolises the conflict within individuals and society about what
childhood represents. But, in our current society, a man re-living his
childhood would involve simply playing computer games and immersing themselves
in a virtual world – which is how many men now continue living their lives into
adulthood, which is an interesting, possibly depressing, thing to contemplate
in itself. At one point in The Child in
Time, Stephen watches a new Government endorsed, all-day television
channel. He despairs of the childishness of the contestants and audience on a
game show. As other critics have noted, McEwan was anticipating our current
obsession with multiple channels, satellite and digital, and the domination of
reality television.
The fictional storyline is a commentary on the way politics
rejects those qualities that are romantically associated with childhood: a
freedom of spirit and unfettered connection with the natural world. But the
television adaptation introduces a darker suggestion of conspiracy within
government: Darke is found dead in the woods, dressed in his schoolboy clothes.
He has apparently committed suicide, unable to reconcile the differences in his
“nature”. However, an earlier scene where the Prime Minister discusses with his
colleague the inconvenience caused by Darke’s actions, combined with mentions
that Charles is under surveillance, suggests that he was actually killed by
security services and his death made to look like suicide. At least one of the public
comments I read after the Guardian online review of the television adaptation
likened this apparent suicide in the woods to the death of the government
scientist Dr David Kelly. Perhaps, in symbolic terms, the ‘murder’ of Darke in
his short trousers represents a child sacrifice.
Believers in Satanism view their practices as influencing or
even controlling events in the physical world. It has been alleged that Satanic
paedophile rings use children to tap into a youthful energy which will confer
on them an increase in power. In the final episode of the first season of the
HBO series True Detective, when asked
where the principal abuser is, his half-sister says he ‘is all around us,
before you were born and after you die’.
This concept of timelessness is one of the principal themes of The Child in Time. Although the
television adaptation omits the references to quantum physics, it retains the
scene at ‘The Bell’ pub. Stephen stumbles upon a pub while on the way to see
his estranged wife. It seems familiar although he cannot remember ever being
there. He looks in the window and sees a woman apparently arguing with her
partner. Later, his now ageing mother reveals how she contemplated aborting
Stephen before seeing a child through the window and realising that this was
going to be her son (the adaptation diluted this to avoid mention of abortion).
In the novel, Stephen collapses after seeing the vision,
temporarily falling into some sort of time warp. It is unsurprising that many
viewers of the television adaptation were confused about the portrayal of a mixing
of past and present in an otherwise “realistic” narrative, without the context
of the discussions of different concepts of time. McEwan himself seemed
conflicted over the scene, having his neurosurgeon hero of the much later novel
Saturday despair of magic realist
novels, particularly one where ‘One visionary saw through a pub window his
parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the
possibility of aborting him’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68). The neuro-surgeon, Henry
Perowne, argues that, as a brain surgeon, he knows ‘for a quotidian fact, the
mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs’ and ‘the supernatural was the
recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish
evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding
re-enactment of the plausible’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68). The scene seemed to offend McEwan’s
self-professed love of science.
But, perhaps, the uncanny and imaginary must break the
conventional veneer of a rational, logical society which has been built on
abuse and deceit. The trauma of the lost child is a cause of social breakdown
and it is also a symptom of a crisis within humanity. The final episode of the
first season of True Detective had a
similar break with realism. There had been earlier signposting to enable
viewers to process Rust’s vision of a whirlpool-like void above the head of the
child-sacrificing villain. Rust mentioned several times that he experienced
occasional hallucinations as a result of his previous time undercover with drug
gangs. However, the visual presentation of the void is so striking and “real”
that it should be considered as something more than mere hallucination. This is
emphasised by Rust’s final speech at the end of the series. He tells his
partner that when he saw the void, at the point of what seemed like his own
imminent death, he felt the presence of his dead daughter. She brought with her
an overwhelming sense of love, a love that was outside of the material
corrupted world. Rust ends by saying that light seemed to be winning its battle
with the dark. This may be a statement which is overly optimistic in view of
the depths of depravity which our world is full of. There can only be hope that
by letting light and love come through the traumatic void which our lost
children leave behind, the material world can fill its own hole.
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