In Publishers Weekly, The Child in Time was billed as "a beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel", with the reviewer describing the kidnapping scene as "more frightening than any from a horror novel".[1] A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews lauded it as "a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication--his most expansive and passionate fiction to date", and argued that the novel shows McEwan to be a writer of "narrative daring and imaginative genius".[2] Judy Cooke argued in The Listener that the novel drew from the major concerns of its decade a "rich, complicated narrative, its ideas embodied in character and situation, its style fluent and witty, engaging the reader's attention on every page." In The Spectator, Brian Martin dubbed it McEwan's best book to that point and "a serious novel which has many levels of intention, and provides many pleasures".[3] Jack Slay also described the book as McEwan's finest in his 1996 study of the author's output.[4]
Other reviews were mixed or negative, however. In the London Review of Books, Nicholas Spice praised McEwan's prose but wrote that the novel "expends its uncommon creative energies on a programme of undistinguished social and philosophical commentary.” Spice compared it unfavourably with an Iris Murdoch book released that year and argued, "Murdoch’s novel ends on a note of foreboding, a dark and open question about what may be coming to term in the womb of time. The Child in Time thinks it knows the answer and offers to play midwife. [...] The novel’s certainty that its values are the right ones, the ones that it is safe to be seen with in public, makes it particularly exasperating to anyone, like myself, who has sponged up the same values from the same cultural pool”.[5]
Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that McEwan uses “his marvelous control and sympathy as a writer [...] to make Stephen's state of mind so palpable that we are made to share all his shifting emotions”. But the critic also described Kate's disappearance as a "heavy-handed metaphor for his own inability to retrieve his youth" and complained that a number of the book's motifs "feel like afterthoughts grafted onto Stephen and Kate's story and not fully assimilated into the text”. Kakutani found the novel "discursive and uneven".[6] Gabriele Annan wrote in The New York Review of Books that too much of the book is "corn".[3]
In 2002, Adam Begley of The Paris Review listed The Child in Time as the beginning of a period in McEwan's career of novels which are "more ambitious than the earlier books, more thoughtful—and equally vivid".[7] Christopher Hitchens stated in 2005 that he still considered the book McEwan's masterpiece.[8] However, Roger Boylan of the Boston Review wrote that the novel's powerful moments were mainly in the parts centring on Stephen's loss, dismissing the book as "overly earnest in its concern with exposing corruption in high places. The political becomes rather too personal, and the different aspects of The Child in Time undermine rather than support one another. The result is a bit of a mess".[9] In a 2015 article for The Guardian, Aida Edemariam wrote that the novel "made imaginable something I had not imagined before, and could not now un-think: that in a moment, and without reason, everything can change, and change utterly".[10] Eileen Battersby, who had reviewed the novel positively upon its release,[11] again praised it in 2014 as “a very powerful third novel and also the one which first suggested that McEwan [...] was far more than a gifted master of menace. Suddenly it seemed that a humane spine did in fact sustain all the terror.” She listed the novel as second only to the first 200 pages of Atonement (2001) in the author’s oeuvre.[12]
