What a rotten title is one’s first thought – and this from someone whose previous titles have always been so finely judged: the hint of paved-over repression in the near-oxymoron of The Cement Garden; the calm, inviting menace of The Comfort of Strangers; and the calculatedly bogus rurality of The Ploughman‘s Lunch. Bur McEwan’s new title sounds like a lopped-off, screwed-up proverb (‘A child in time saves nine’, perhaps), or like a time-slip children’s novel by Alison Uttley, or even maybe a thesis about the changing role of the child through history. It also has an air of making inflated claims for itself.

These claims are, in part, justified by the product (over long stretches of the new book McEwan demonstrates that he has never written better), but there is a great deal that is seriously wrong with The Child in Time – misjudgements and thinnesses which seem to spring from a creative