(I am reposting this as it connects to my previous blog on Stranger Things...new content to follow soon)
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 (The Child in Time, 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, a series which features such rings, the half-sister of the principal abuser, when asked where he is, 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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