Customer Reviews

The Cement Garden

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Ian McEwan freezes our attention on the grotesque, then renders grotesquerie plausible, even "normal." Indeed, what is "natural" assumes an expanded range of possibility in McEwan's writing, adding fresh dimension to psychological horror. The Cement Garden, his first novel (and better described as a novella), brings these observations graphically to life, in precise, crystalline prose.

The Cement Garden has been likened to Golding's Lord of the Flies for its careful evocation of a society of young people, suddenly relieved of adult oversight, that evolves rapidly, opportunistically, organically in response to specific challenges posed by an unusual environment. In McEwan's working of these materials, related in the flat, dispassionate voice of Jack, the 14-year-old narrator, the challenging environment is the solitary house in which Jack, his brother, and two sisters live, set in the midst of a desolate urban landscape cleared for a freeway that never gets built.

The book takes its name from the paved-over garden Jack's fussy, acerbic father, a heart patient, envisions as tidier as easier to maintain. The exertions of the project kill the father, to no one's apparent regret, in the first chapter, leaving a sizable inventory of cement behind. With the demise of their long ailing mother shortly thereafter, the orphaned children are forced to recreate the family unit. Fearful of the split-up of the family, foster care for little Tom, and other worrisome ministrations of an impersonal state, the children decide to tell no one of their mother's death and to entomb her in concrete in the basement.

Jack recounts these and other details, and the changes each child undergoes, in his matter-of-fact voice. McEwan charges his tale with an extraordinary measure of sexual tension, primarily between Jack - much more than the stereotypically acne-covered, pubescent, serially self-abusing "sullen teen" - and his beautiful, athletic older sister Julia, who assumes the maternal role of "Wendy" to the family's "lost children." The movement of the story is aided and abetted by Derek, Julia's "bloke," a professional snooker player, aking all the questions the nosey private eye in a Hitchcock picture usually asks. The dreaded resolution of the relentlessly rising tension, carefully withheld until the closing pages, relieves narrative pressure but raises disturbing perspectives on love, the family, the "ties that bind."

The Cement Garden renews, at least in my mind, the great question of what it is that prompts a lavishly gifted writer to explore so sensitively the wholly bizarre. Great writing generally works simultaneously at several levels and admits layers of meaning. McEwan writes about familiar characters who before our eyes become something very, very different. He begs us to inquire beneath the surface familiarity into worlds unseen by, or denied to, passing spectators. He compels us to ask ourselves "what is `normal'?" "What is `natural'?" His answers may unsettle, but they are are the product of a novelistic logic that, in its internal workings, is eminently reasonable.

The Cement Garden is assuredly not for every taste. More than once, I looked up from the page with an "ugh." McEwan's imagination teems with clambering spiders. But as an early example of McEwan's art and his project to redefine, or reinvent, the psychological horror story, this book is a worthy, if unsettling, read.

"I did not kill my father," this slim novel begins, "but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way." Soon the mother is dead as well, and four children are left to fend for themselves in a secluded house in a dying part of the city.

There's Julie, the eldest, a ripe & willful beauty who's almost a woman; there's Jack, the narrator, a boy bewildered by his growing body & appetites; there's Sue, bookish & ever-observant; and then there's Tom, the baby of the family, who actually seems to get younger, regressing as the days go by. These four form an uneasy family, slowly learning to be self-sufficient in this strangely apocalyptic setting.

But an intruder in the form of Julie's new boyfriend threatens their fragile stasis by asking too many questions. How long have the four of them been alone? And just what is buried under the crumbling pile of cement in the basement?

This book has been mistakenly marketed as a horror novel; it's horrific, sure, but not as horrible as the pulp that defines the genre. What makes it particularly good is its characters, the children who are both recognizably sympathetic and exotically extraordinary.

Ian McEwan has created a taut & provocative thriller written in pitch-perfect and stripped-down prose. Beyond being a macabre morality tale, The Cement Garden is a psychological-suspense yarn, a perceptive portrayal of adolescence that will keep you riveted up to the final, climactic scene in an upstairs bedroom.

Incest is the latest trendy topic- be it in book, movie, fiction, memoir- and it would be easy to brush it off as mere titillation. At first, "The Cement Garden" seems to be the epitome of this sort of gratuitously shocking genre, as it painstakingly gets inside the head of a young man and his secret desires. Upon closer examination, "The Cement Garden" reveals itself to be a far more ominous book. His desire for his sister becomes indicative of his need to grab an anchor in a world that has left him behind. As these four children struggle to make a family, the sexual energy that emerges becomes a better form of family love than that which they've known before. Though the children are English, they are the British equivalent of the kind of people we so quickly and easily make fun of- the natural target of a certain type of elitist humor. Rather than mocking these children for their transgression, the book's success comes when we ultimately understand the ways and the whys of why they do what they do. Therein lies the power, and the horror of the bleak landscape of the novel- it's the only love they'll maybe ever know. Having said that the book is an artistic achievement, I also want to add that when I finished it I couldn't be sure that I was glad I took that particular journey. I was utterly enthralled with the story and its raw honesty, but so depressed when it was over, as the world of the book was so hermetic and insular that there was no way out- necessary to the book but brutal on the reader. As an aside, the film adaptation is highly worth checking out as a most faithful visual translation, mostly as a result of the bizarrely appropriate casting. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of French pop star Serge Gainsbourg and Chelsea girl Jane Birkin. (Serge and Charlotte appeared in bed together in a print ad in the early 80s.) Furthermore, the film is directed by Jane's brother and hence Charlotte's uncle Andrew Birkin, and the younger children are played by the director's own children- Charlotte's cousins.

THE CEMENT GARDEN is the gripping story of a small family, isolated from society, and struggling with events for which society maintains strict rules. It is a well-crafted reflection on society and normalcy. It is technically well-written, poetic and confident in tone, a superb psychological portrait.

Four children, who previously lost their father, now tend their ailing mother, whom they will soon lose as well. Two boys and two girls (two young and two teenaged), they attend school as normal, but the family has always been isolated. The mother hardly let them leave the house when she was alive, so they do not know how to handle her body now that she's died, and take it to the basement. As a subplot, the older boy and girl explore sexuality with each other, in a candid scene.

Suprisingly, we are not bothered by these activities as such. McEwan's psychological portraits are convincing, and his characters seem entirely normal. His writing skill is evident when one realizes the sympathy with which these four characters are drawn.

The novel's tension comes unexpectedly from a banal source: The older girl has a boyfriend, a conventional person, but McEwan has convinced us the family is normal, so to us, the boyfriend is an outsider. How will the boyfriend act? Will he discover the secret? If so, will he reveal it? Will he become an insider, will he clean up the mess and help the four become legitimate, will he blackmail them, or will he tell society and let them be punished as normal? If the latter, will society punish them harshly?

At the end, one wonders how horrible the youth really were, even if they lived outside social norms. What is the line between innocently mistaken and socially unacceptable? The novel is an excellent exploration of this question, and the inquisitive reader may judge this matter for themself.

A minor complaint: I have heard the movie omits the book's last paragraph, which I think was wise. The author might have witheld the explicit conclusion, forcing the reader to guess what might happen. This does not detract from the book's quality in any way, nor the reader's ability to consider the matter in their own mind, on their own.

This short novella deals with a similar theme to that of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, namely the behaviour of children and adolescents when free of the constraints of adult behaviour. Four siblings from a working-class family - Jack, the teenaged narrator, his older sister Julie, younger sister Sue and the youngest, Tom- are orphaned by the death of their mother, their father having died about two years earlier. In order to stay together and avoid being put into the care of the local authority, they conceal their mother's death by hiding her body in a trunk, filling it with cement and leaving it in the cellar of their house. As it is the summer holidays, there is no school for them to attend, and they spend the long, hot days in idleness. Apart from Tom, who occasionally plays with boys from a nearby tower block, the youngsters avoid contact with the outside world, until Julie introduces an outsider into their home in the shape of her older boyfriend Derek. The final denouement arises as a result of the conflict between Julie's relationship with Derek and the growing incestuous feelings between her and Jack.

The book was published in 1978 and, although there are no explicit period references, in many ways it reflects the mood of Britain in the late seventies. That was a time of economic recession, of industrial unrest, of unemployment, of concern about declining public services and the condition of the inner cities. (The period also saw some of the hottest summers of recent decades). The weak minority government of Prime Minister James Callaghan was widely perceived as being unable or unwilling to do anything about the country's problems. The era also saw a growing sense of youthful rebelliousness and resentment of adult authority which found its most extreme expression in the punk movement. Although a generation gap was not a new phenomenon, the mood of the young in the seventies was quite different to that of their older brothers and sisters in the sixties. Youthful rebellion in the hippy era often took the form of altruistic idealism, and even in its hedonistic forms tended to be joyous and optimistic. The rebellion of the young in the seventies, by contrast, tended to be more sour and resentful, characterised by a cynical pessimism.

The setting of the book is a bleak, impoverished district of an unnamed British inner city. The children's house is one of the few remaining in an area marked out for redevelopment, and is surrounded either by soulless tower blocks or by derelict, rubble-strewn wasteland. Their garden, one of the few islands of green in the area, has been concreted over by their father (hence the title of the book). A dustmen's' strike means that refuse is not being collected. There is a pervasive atmosphere of stifling heat and noxious odours. The children- Jack in particular- are cynical, apathetic and suspicious of the adult world in all its forms. Their independent life together has few positive attractions- its main features are boredom, squalor and quarrels- but they prefer it to the alternative of submitting to adult authority. The incestuous relationship between Jack and Julie can be seen as both the ultimate expression of family solidarity and as a conscious rejection of the taboos and conventions of the adult world.

A word that has been used by other reviewers about this book is "gothic". With two qualifications, that is a useful categorisation. The first qualification is that the so-called "gothic" movement in literature, a literature obsessed with death, darkness, gloom and despair, has very little connection with Gothic architecture, an architecture that celebrates life, light, colour and faith. The second qualification is that McEwan's work represents a modern development of the "gothic" tradition; he has abandoned the supernatural elements and exotic settings beloved of Georgian and Victorian gothic authors, but has retained their fascination with death, decay and the macabre and their emphasis on the darker side of human nature, including human sexuality, which can be treated with a greater freedom than was possible for earlier writers. (Besides the incest of Jack and Julie, Tom, the youngest child, who loves to dress as a girl, is presented as a budding transvestite).

McEwan's prose in this work is deliberately simple- the sentences are short, with few dependent clauses, and mostly describe concrete actions with little room for speculation or analysis of thoughts and feelings. (This is not surprising, given that it is narrated by a young boy of both limited education and limited experience). Despite the terseness of the prose and the desolate urban setting, however, this is not a work of social realism. If one tries to read it as realistic fiction, a number of details do not ring true. (Would the disappearance of the children's mother, for example, really have gone unnoticed by the outside world for so long, especially as she had been receiving medical treatment for her illness and had even arranged to go into hospital?) If, however, one reads it as a work of grim fantasy, it can be seen as an accomplished and powerful piece of work. The combination of matter-of-fact narration and bleak modern setting with macabre horror and bizarre happenings gives the work an eerie, hallucinatory quality; not so much a midsummer night's dream as a midsummer nightmare.

This is an essential McEwan novel from the start of his career which captivates through its 140-odd pages. Like all McEwan novels it starts shockingly and it maintains this throughout, without overstating itself: indeed, because the story is told through the eyes of Jack, engulfed in the events of the book, it comes out in a chillingly offhand manner. The way it actually plays with your mind so that part of you doesn't want them to be caught, though you know in reality that is what should occur, is particularly disturbing.

The characterisation in the book is superb: not only that of the children, who are extremely multi-faceted and complex, brought out in a concise and suggestive rather than explicit manner, but also the father, mother and boyfriend, none of whom are described in extreme detail, but all of whom are imaginable. The prose is unromantic and flat to reflect Jack's own tone, yet this is ultimately appropriate. Though it could have been longer, its brevity is an asset insofar as it feels like a finely drawn short story. Well worth a read.

In this discomforting 1978 novel, Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan shows all the promise that makes his later, more fully developed novels so compelling--the same intensity, the same psychologically intriguing characters, the same haunting darkness, and the same exploration of sexuality. In the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere of an old house, one of the few left standing in a London urban renewal area strewn with rubble, a family of four children, ranging in age from six to seventeen, try to survive on their own after the death of their father, first, and then, their mother. Because the three younger children will have to go into "care" if their mother's death is known, they dispose of her body themselves in the basement of their decaying house and carry on as if their parents are still alive.

Seventeen-year-old Julie is ostensibly the adult in charge, though fifteen-year-old Jack has promised his dying mother that he will share the responsibilities. Jack, who narrates the story, is filled with all the sexual angst of an isolated young boy, never part of the mainstream, trying to figure out who he is, at the same time that he has been thrust into an adult role that he cannot fulfill. During the hottest summer on record, a new complication arises with the appearance of Julie's boyfriend, Derek, a man in his twenties, who upsets the fragile equilibrium of the family by investigating their secrets and seeking out the source of the sweetish smell emanating from the basement. All the emotional and sexual tensions which McEwan has nurtured throughout the novel peak in a conclusion that is both repulsive and utterly compelling.

This novel is not for the faint of heart, sometimes so revolting and disturbing in its psychological details, all vividly rendered, that the reader may question whether to continue reading. Ultimately, however, McEwan's concise and polished style, his ability to choose exactly the right word, and his sense of pacing kept this reader going, even as the family dynamics degenerated into a psychotic twilight zone. The sense that each character is alone and that life is dark and unlikely to change for the better is a despairing commentary on life, a bleak and chilling reminder that no one can ever control fate. Eerie, provocative, and suspenseful, McEwan uses all his talents here to create a novel of small scope and scale. In later novels, thankfully, he applies these same talents to a broader canvas, leading to richer, more subtle, and better developed fiction. Mary Whipple

"The Cement Garden" is one of the early novellas by Ian McEwan, a winner of the 1998 Booker Prize for his novel "Amsterdam". Perhaps there is a reason why this book is not as popular as it might be, given the later-day success of this writer, as indicated by the awards. "The Cement Garden" is a plot-driven story with a great potential which nevertheless has never been exploited.

The family of a marriage with four children falls apart when both parents suddenly die. Even here, in the very beginning of the book the storyline is unconvincing. After the father dies from stroke, the mother follows him in short order, apparently from incurable illness. In the very first chapter, the very first page even, when this information is passed to the reader - I wish the author had given some more thought to the actual events. The coincidence of their passing away is too artificial for my liking. Even the dysfunctionality of the family does not ring true. Of four children, only one appears to be sane, and what exactly is the probability that out of three teenagers and one toddler - one will turn out to be an early transvestite, and two others incestuous? The plot itself was bland, everything might be intuited right away. If only there was more to this book that the aforementioned storyline, that wouldn't hurt. Sadly, it isn't the case, as McEwan hints at the upcoming events in a bold fashion.

The potential of the tale was not explored, and McEwan seemed to hesitate as to the actual course of the story. Circling around the seemingly unexpected solution to the situation the four children found themselves in, McEwan never dared deliver what he undoubtedly wanted to. This novel was hailed as the second Lord of the Flies (originally written by William Golding), and it just might have been, but wasn't, when all is said and done. In the writing itself, there is no hint that the author would one day win the Booker Prize. Having just closed the last page I have not retained any memory of anything original to the writing style of McEwan. All faults of this book combined together give an impression of a forced work, where everything seems to be stretched and artificial.

While reading a review of The Cement Garden, I had the uncanny feeling that I'd read this book before, then found the name of the book I was thinking of in a customer review at Amazon--Our Mother's House, by Julian Gloag. I had to order them both to read/reread/compare. Both are books about kids whose mothers die of unnamed wasting diseases who decide to dispose of the bodies and continue living as a family. On one hand, this is the set-up of a fairy tale... because the first general rule of a fairy tale is that your mother dies. But these are Gothic stories, with a house, a virgin and a secret.

Our Mother's House older, published in the seventies, the story of seven--seven!--kids. "Mother" was a vicar's daughter, a keeper of a neat, harmonious household in a decaying neighborhood. There was a husband, unknown to the kids and condemned by the mother. Support comes from monthly checks that one of the younger boys, an artistic genius, endorses in his mother's hand. The story is told in tightly focused third person, and Hugh is the point of most of the focus. Hugh craves (and helps to create a semblance of) order. Two of the other kids embrace religion feverishly when their mother dies, and commit some gross evil in the name of righteousness, the tragic results of which bond the kids even further in the name of complicity. They were blameless in the death of their mother but they do not remain blameless, and so their chance of asking for help has passed. The kids are worried about a neighbor, the housekeeper and gardener (who they fire), and a nosy teacher, Miss Deke, who puts her head in now and then, demanding to see their mother. For a while they are helped by an adult who is really just helping himself to their money and home. They live for over a year until, well, the inevitable. Because discovery is inevitable, right? Discovery is rescue, and we can't stand for kids to live in parentless squalor forever, their sheets unwashed, their hair matted, their lives degenerating.

The four Cement Garden kids are more isolated, living in a neighborhood where most homes were condemned for a never-built roadway. Their parents are offered up in more detail. The father is a difficult character, the mother yielding and excusing of his fussy, demanding, rigid ways. The narrating character, Jack, is in collusion with his two sisters. They all look after his younger brother, Tom, treating him less like a child than a simple-minded, small peer. The older three children have responded to the general air of repression and frustration in their home with sex games that fuel Jack's longing for his older sister, Julie. Though Jack is a social outcast going through a particularly pimpled adolescence, it is less the sex that thrills him and more the sense of collusion, of togetherness in a world in which they have their own secrets. This sense is lost when their parents die. Each child spirals off into his or her own private world, mimicking their parents' isolation from each other and their kids.

This made me think about how, as kids, parents seem to exist as something to unite against. They are the safety net and the oppressors, security and prison all in one. In following what happens to the kids in these books, I guess Lord of the Flies sets the expected pattern. I expected that some kids would want to follow the old rules, while others would descend into "savagery." But these kids don't want to be detected, so the old forms must be followed.

In Our Mother's House, the older girl Elsa (age 13) becomes the mother, firmly insisting that the rules and patterns must abide. Dunstan, the oldest boy, installs himself as a religious martinet (though lying, drinking, snooping and death are all terrifying to the kids, religion is the only great Evil in this book). The mother in this book was loving and present. The life she's created for her kids is full of love, pattern, small rituals, physical affection, order. As a result, her kids actually fare better, psychologically. They are lost and grasping without that love, but at least they had it at one point. It's clear that their needs had been met, that they had been loved.

The Cement Garden kids are not as fortunate. They operated in unison against their parents. They were belittled by their father, and their father was protected by their mother. When the parents die, the kids are splintered, there is no more unity because there is nothing left to unite against. They follow separate, strange, eerie paths to self-definition and preservation. I don't want to wreck either book for possible readers, but the Cement Garden kids fascinate me. Every step they take is so wrong, and yet inexorable. Inadequately parented kids are inadequate to the task of parenting themselves--or each other. Especially each other. Julie's attempts devolve into grotesquerie.

In both these books, the confusion and yearning for order and care are followed by an occasional Bacchanalian sense of celebration that there is none. Comparisons have been made to Lord of the Flies, but I don't see those as apt for two reasons; one, despite what blurbers have to say, there is no chilling, inexorable evil (aside from religion, which is discarded by Dunstan) asserted in either book, and two, adults, and the civilizing forces they represent are always available to both families. They are not lost on islands, there are neighbors, friends, various busybodies aplenty in both books. The isolation is chosen. This gives an interesting element to both books--in the element of choice, and in the examination of the parents involved. How did they set up their kids for this particular choice?

I've been looking at the books, trying to figure out the key to the parenting. I think I've found it in the gardens. The garden in Our Mother's House is shaggy, untamed. There's a pile of old yellow brick near a hole that's been dug, a promised "sunken garden" for the kids. Swing, trees, a large patch of Lilies of the Valley, under which they will bury their mother. When they dig, they find the earth is full of stones. Their garden stands in direct contrast to their neighbor Mr. Halpert's garden, tidy and boxed and in possession of an automatic sprinkler. But it's a welcoming place for children, where they can play and exist and be kids. it goes wild after the mother dies, it becomes a contained but salvageable wilderness around the reminder of her grave. The garden, like the children, can recover. But the plans for the titular cement garden are in effect the blueprint for the lives the children will live after their parents die.

To quote:

"He had constructed rather than cultivated his garden according to some plans he sometimes spread out on the kitchen table while we peered over his shoulder. There were narrow flagstone paths which made elaborate curves to visit flower beds that were only a few feet away. One path spiralled up round a rockery as though it were a mountain pass. It annoyed him to see Tom walking straight up the side of the rockery, using the path like a short path of stairs. "Walk it properly," he shouted out the kitchen window. There was a lawn the size of a card table raised a couple of feet on a pile of rocks. Round the edge of the lawn there was just space for a single row of marigolds. He alone called it the hanging garden. In the very center of the hanging garden was a plaster stature of a dancing Pan. Here and there were sudden flights of steps, down, and then up. There was a pond with a blue plastic bottom. One day he brought home two goldfish in a plastic bag. The birds ate them on the first day. The paths were so narrow it was possible to lose your footing and fall into the flower beds. He chose flowers for their neatness and symmetry. He liked tulips and planted them well apart. He did not like bushes or ivy or roses. He would have nothing that tangled. On either side of us the houses had been cleared and in summer the vacant sites grew lush with weeds and their flowers. Before his first heart attack he had intended to build a high wall round his special world."

Ah, well. Pointless, paved over, smashed down, this is a garden where nothing will ever bloom. Of the two, Cement Garden is the better book, but it's also the sadder book.

I am amased by the contemporary British fiction, but Ian McEwan has won my heart completely with his novels. I like the novels I have been able to get hold on to but I love the Cement garden. It is a magnificent novel about four children trying to adjust to the situation so unusual, unfamiliar and terrifying to them. They have no idea how to act, because their parents (especially father) have been extremely protective and have not communicated normally with the outer world. In this extreme situation they act as they think is right, and frankly, I would have done the same in the same situation. I also love Ian McEwan's style--it is so tense that it is impossible to put the book away, and the descriptions are amasing. The description of the summer was so convincing that while reading I started to feel so hot it was impossible to breathe. I like the novel not only because of the style but because of the way it made me feel. I felt extreme closeness with the children, and it almost made me a part of the family.