Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987, this novel chronicles a father’s tragic loss, his deep grief, and his reconciliation to the world of the living. The protagonist is Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children’s books. His life story is a simple and happy one: after a typical period of aimless wandering following the completion of his university studies, Stephen had had an unusual bit of luck when the manuscript he submitted to a leading publisher ended up on the desk of the children’s editor. As a novel for adults, Lemonade would have been an undistinguished example of competent fiction, but as a book for young readers it was an extraordinary success.
Stephen and his loving wife, Julie, a classical musician, are happily settled in London and have begun a financially comfortable and personally satisfying family life with the birth of a daughter, Kate. But at the age of three, Kate disappeared from the grocery store where her father had brought her along on a routine shopping trip. She had been snatched by an unknown stranger; no ransom note followed, and no clue to her whereabouts could be found. Stephen and Julie are paralyzed in a suspended state of futile hopes and fruitless waiting, and in the meantime their marriage is falling apart as each spouse copes with his and her separate griefs.
The narrative opens two years later, when Stephen is still haunted by the search for his daughter that has become as integral to his life as breathing. With every step, he is looking for the five-year-old girl she would have become, even as he tries half-heartedly to return to some kind of normal life. His best friend, the publisher Charles Darke, figures at the center of the novel’s subplot. While Stephen sinks into a numb despair, Charles enters into politics with unprecedented success. While Stephen and Julie separate, Charles and his wife, Thelma, a physicist, maintain a powerful bond. They try to draw Stephen out of his paralyzed waiting for Kate to return; Charles appoints Stephen as a member of a government commission on childhood, and for the first time in two years the bereaved father begins to venture away from the telephone at home. He even visits Julie at the woodland cottage to which she has retreated, and for a day their marriage seems to have a ghost of a chance of surviving.
Gradually, life imposes itself on Stephen’s awareness. In one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, he witnesses an accident on the highway and rescues a driver from the crushed wreckage of his truck. The survival of this stranger is a miraculous event, recounted in images of birth pangs and surrounded by inexplicable joy. Other key moments begin to reconnect Stephen to the progress of time, slowly extricating him from the infinite immobility of his grief. He witnesses a reversal in the life of Charles Darke, whose return to childhood ends in tragic petulance. Little by little, scenes of birth and death jolt Stephen from his catatonic state of waiting for Kate. Through his connection to the work of the commission, he rejoins the onward rush of the business of life. When an urgent call from Julie summons him to her side, he is finally ready to put his grief to rest and to embrace the challenges of getting on with the joys and pains of living. In an emotionally powerful and deeply moving conclusion, Stephen and Julie return to life, to love, and to their marriage.
Ian McEwan’s quiet story emphasizes character development and symbolic imagery over complex plotting. In a simple story of loss and recovery, McEwan captures a tremendous depth of feeling and a wide range of experience at the personal level and in the larger social and political spheres as well. The third-person narrator focuses intently on Stephen’s stunned life and his painful recovery, but doing so allows the remaining action of the story to rise to an unforeseen and yet perfectly natural climax. The novel’s resolution restores hope and love to their proper places in life, suggesting that harmony restored at the personal level cannot but help to correct the bigger imbalances in the world as well.
Bibliography
Malcolm, David. Understanding Ian McEwan. Understanding Contemporary British Literature Series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002, 88–109.
Slay, Jack Jr. Ian McEwan. Twayne’s English Authors Series, 518. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, 115–133.