The Best in People
The novel is about a father who pays just enough inattention for just long enough to lose his only daughter forever inside a supermarket. As he begins frantically searching for her, his terror becomes all too impossible to ignore and suddenly:
“The anonymity of the city store turned out to be frail, a thin crust beneath which people observed, judged, remembered.”
A Short History of Childhood
The ruminates over the meaning of childhood by considering how short a time in history it has really been that children were treated as children:
“There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource. Above all, childhood is a privilege.”
The Prime Minister
The book is set in an indefinite near-future; near enough, at any rate, that England still exists and still has a Prime Minister who still fulfills the same metaphorical role:
“This was the nation’s parent, after all, a repository of collective fantasy.”
Thelma
Thelma is the wife of the publisher of the books written by the protagonist. She is a physicist and perhaps best defined by her physicist view of the rest of the world, which is exceedingly dismissive of “arts” people. Or, maybe she just doesn’t like Virginia Woolf.
“As far as I can make out, you think that some local, passing fashion like modernism – modernism! – is the intellectual achievement of our time.”
Time
As one might naturally expect given the title, the issue and concept of time plays an important role in the novel. Stephen, the protagonist, is particularly affected by how his relation to time has changed since his daughter’s abduction and he consumes a good amount of time pondering over it:
“Time was redeemed, time assumed purpose all over again because it was the medium for the fulfilment of desire.”
