Though Julie and Stephen temporarily reconnect during his visit and sleep together, Kate's absence has become too great a divider between the two and they part believing it impossible to overcome her loss.

A few years later, Charles, who according to Thelma suffered from bipolar disorder, commits suicide after being unable to reconcile his political ambitions and drive with his desire for recreating his missed childhood.

[citation needed] It also explores the way both Stephen's and Julie's lives disintegrate after Kate's disappearance, and how an unexpected event at the very end of the book may bring them back together.

[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 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.

[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”.

[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".

[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.

[citation needed] In February 2017, BBC One commissioned a television film adaptation of the novel starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald.