He set the fish down and asked the girl for a carrier bag. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He took it and turned. Kate was gone.
The central event and driving force of the narrative is the abduction of the young daughter of the protagonist. The first tenth of the book describes in detail the events leading to the moment and the events which immediately follow them. The actual event itself is almost-climactic, so quickly does it happen and so prosaically is it described. But then that is exactly how these tragedies happen all-too-often. The single defining moment of entire story is a realization of that horrible phrase heard way too often: “I looked away for just a few seconds and when I looked back…”
“the more intimately a father is involved in the day to day care of a small child, the less effective he becomes as a figure of authority. The child who feels himself to be loved by a father who strikes the proper balance between affection and distance is well on the way to being prepared emotionally for the separations to come, separations which are an inevitable part of all growing up.”
Each chapter begins with a quote from a book which is to be published after the protagonist becomes a member of the Prime Minister’s Official Commission on Child Care Subcommittee on Reading and Writing. As a success writer of children’s books, he becomes part of this committee with that is charged with reporting their findings and conclusions for the purpose of being published as a handbook. Only it turns out, he finds, that the book had already been written in advance and the committee was just political propaganda.
“Do you know a pub called The Bell near Otford in Kent?”
Directed to his mother, the question seems mundane enough and utterly harmless. She replies by shaking her head and asking if it’s near Old Romney. The real answer to his query, however, is anything but mundane. In fact, the answer will go a long way toward explaining the title of the novel.
But time—not necessarily as it is, for who knows that, but as thought has constituted it—monomaniacally forbids second chances. There is no absolute time, his friend Thelma had told him on occasions, no independent entity. Only our particular and weak understanding.
Friend Thelma is a professor of physics—like the guy in that 1990’s science fiction TV show who goes leaping around in time. Thelma doesn’t go leaping around in time, but her religion is quantum physics (though it is explicitly stated that “science was Thelma’s child” ) and so one of the tenets she worships is that the conventional view of time as linear and absolute is “nonsense or a tiny fraction of the truth.” This is Quantum Leap, of course, but the flexibility of time as it is perceived is woven into the tale in a subtle tapestry beginning with the seeming impossibility of a child going missing with a trace in just a matter of seconds and on through the vaguely futuristic England in which the story is set.
