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.
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![The Cement Garden (Ian McEwan Series Book 2) by [Ian McEwan]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51nQGqeohPL._SY346_.jpg)
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