When he was out he dreaded returning to the deadly alignments of familiar possessions, the way the empty armchairs squatted, the smeared plates and old newspapers at their feet. I particularly admire the lovingly painted details of that disorder that is the natural outward expression of the eviscerated passivity of his characters: ''Mostly he was indifferent to the squalor of his flat, the meaty black flies and their leisurely patrols. McEwan is something of a master at representing misery. McEwan's earlier creations tend to be unlikable misfits - chillingly unwholesome children and adolescents - in this work we are in the company of a sympathetic adult, a parent, devastated by the completeness of his loss.īut the psychic territory is very much the same: a state of distraction so dazed and dispirited that characters are unable to control even their own fantasy life, much less events of the external world.

McEwan's fiction, who stalk the bleak and airless site of his imagination with empty eyes and strange desires.

This is a familiar habitat for characters in Mr. Kate was gone.'' The narrative that follows takes place largely within the fragmented psyche of the father, Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, who is transported by his bereavement to the extreme reaches of passivity, alienation and solitude. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He set the fish down and asked the girl for a shopping bag. She copied him, but clumsily, wrinkling her nose and closing both eyes. As he took the salmon from the cart, he glanced down at Kate and winked. ''The checkout girl was already at work, the fingers of one hand flickering over the keypad while the other drew Stephen's items towards her. A 3-year-old girl, on a mundane Saturday morning trip to the local supermarket, is snatched away, literally under her father's nose. My intention to watch out for time was momentarily forgotten in the powerful grip of the opening pages, in which the central event of the novel unfolds. Bohm's book signal that the nature of time itself is to be a subject in the novel to follow. McEwan's title, so, I reasoned, must the presence of Mr. As these last two are clearly directed to the child in Mr. The other books are interesting, too: Christina Hardyment's ''Dream Babies,'' covering three centuries of advice to parents, and Joseph Chilton Pearce's ''Magical Child,'' a 1977 book promising to reveal the biological plan underlying a child's developing intelligence.

In his acknowledgments, among the three books to which he says he is indebted, is ''Wholeness and the Implicate Order,'' a highly theoretical and abstract work by the highly theoretical and abstract English physicist David Bohm. $16.95.īEFORE I had reached even its first sentence, Ian McEwan's new novel managed to startle me.

Then she was gone review