Collected Edition S.
2 total works
The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team.
Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted innocence.
The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening -- a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.
Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted innocence.
The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening -- a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.
Ia McEwan's third novel, The Child in Time, is a political tale of an England where beggars are licensed and parents intructed that childhood is a disease to be treated with discipline. It is also an exploration of time and timelessness, full of the wonder of contemporary physics and the relativity of individual experience. Above all, it is an intimate tale of parental grief and marital atrophy. Profound and precisely written, with its feeling for the ravaging of the English landscape, magical fantasy, farce, deeply felt melancholy and sense of loss, this is a work of extraordinary imaginiative power. The Child in Time won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.