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 unfavorably 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.”