An internal novel that plays on its title: the search for childhood lost or to be yet found, and time moving back and forth in waves, weaving past and present into one tapestry.

In typical McEwan tradition, the novel hovers around a singular event - protagonist Stephen loses his three year old daughter in a supermarket -an event that send his marriage and personal life into a dark spiral. As Stephen tries to grapple with his loss and revisits his own lost childhood, his friend and one-time publisher, Charles, gives up the good life of a successful businessman and politician to retreat into the woods in Suffolk and play on tree houses, even visiting prostitutes to have himself spanked by matronly whores.

Through their retreat into the past, both discover an immutable truth, which is the moral of the novel: redemption lies in creating,in moving forward, not in retreating.

I found the writing was very narrative-focussed and the constant weaving of past and present put me on edge, because I never knew when I was going to be in the past vs. the present vs. somewhere in between. Yet, the prose is elegant and McEwan has the knack of bringing out mood, character and setting in a single complex sentence.

There were little asides on the fate of the writer which interested me: writing is deemed a social act in a public medium; writing extends the private life. Charles and Stephen embody this philosophy: the former as the author of a "how to" manual on the raising of children sponsored by none other than the prime minister who has a secret sexual interest in his protégé, and the latter as an author of children's books.

And yet many of the elements of the "novel" were missing: Charles' sexual deviancies were "told" to us by his wife Thelma, rather than "shown" to us in his behaviour; the parliamentary committee on children’s issues goes into speeches and moralizing to indicate their stance on the subject they were supposed to address; and Stephen, our narrator, is constantly in his head trying to sort out one scene in his past from another - if he was lost, so was I at times.

Having written these kinds of books in the earlier part of his career, I am glad that McEwan is now moving into telling us better stories, with the accent on "story", not "head games."