The cement garden
Ian McEwan
‘McEwan’s brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate
discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible
significance’
observer
Muna Al Helo
V4b
17 januarie 2019
First year of
publication:1978
Sintmaartenscollege
Maastricht
, Book review, The cement garden, Ian McEwan
November 26, 1978
Damaged People
By ANNE TYLER
This brief novel is really a kind of extended dream, although there's nothing
dreamy about the precision and clarity of the writing. Its narrator, Jack, is a 15-
year-old English boy so sunk in self-loathing that there are long stretches when he
can't even be bothered to bathe or brush his teeth. Jack's father is a crabbed,
oppressive man whose greatest pride is a tightly constructed garden of plaster,
plastic, rocks and widely spaced tulips; his mother is not much more than a
shadow, and their neighborhood is a wasteland of abandoned prefabs. Life here
seems smothered, flattened. For Jack, his two sisters and his little brother, the only
pleasures are those that erupt beneath a rigid surface: some rather joyless sexual
games and a few stolen moments of willful disobedience.
"The Cement Garden" describes the process that steadily isolates these four
children, until they're so absolutely alone and so at odds with the rest of the world
that there is not way of returning to normal life. First their father dies, and then their
mother. The loss of their mother leaves them without relatives; so to avoid being
separated they keep her death a secret and bury her in a trunkful of wet cement in
the basement. From then on, it's all regression and decay. Garbage spills across the
kitchen floor, food rots and flies swarm. The cement in the basement develops a
crack and the presence of the body becomes increasingly obvious. Tom, the little
brother, first transforms himself into a girl and then into a baby in a crib, and Jack and
his older sister develop a sexual relationship that makes them seem, paradoxically,
almost as infantile as Tom. Even the neighborhood grows starker, as the prefabs
crumble and fall away. By the end, we're left with four stripped, empty characters and
not a shred of hope.
In one sense, this is an easy novel to read. The story skims along, and the style is so
direct that we have no trouble accepting the fact that it's a 15-year-old speaking. Jack
is articulate but never precious; he succeeds all too well in letting us into his numbed,
frozen world. "Except for the times I go down into the cellar," he says, "I feel like I'm
asleep. Whole weeks go by without noticing, and if you asked me what happened
three days ago I wouldn't be able to tell you." He wanders through a burnt-out
building and discovers a mattress in a bedroom. "The people who slept on that
mattress, I thought, really believed they were in 'the bedroom.' They took it for
granted that it would always be so." And when his sisters, in one short-lived burst of
energy, set a conventional meal upon the table, he's surprised that "There was a
chair for each plate. . .as if we were real people."
Ian McEwan
‘McEwan’s brilliance as a novelist lies in his ability to isolate
discrete moments in life and invest them with incredible
significance’
observer
Muna Al Helo
V4b
17 januarie 2019
First year of
publication:1978
Sintmaartenscollege
Maastricht
, Book review, The cement garden, Ian McEwan
November 26, 1978
Damaged People
By ANNE TYLER
This brief novel is really a kind of extended dream, although there's nothing
dreamy about the precision and clarity of the writing. Its narrator, Jack, is a 15-
year-old English boy so sunk in self-loathing that there are long stretches when he
can't even be bothered to bathe or brush his teeth. Jack's father is a crabbed,
oppressive man whose greatest pride is a tightly constructed garden of plaster,
plastic, rocks and widely spaced tulips; his mother is not much more than a
shadow, and their neighborhood is a wasteland of abandoned prefabs. Life here
seems smothered, flattened. For Jack, his two sisters and his little brother, the only
pleasures are those that erupt beneath a rigid surface: some rather joyless sexual
games and a few stolen moments of willful disobedience.
"The Cement Garden" describes the process that steadily isolates these four
children, until they're so absolutely alone and so at odds with the rest of the world
that there is not way of returning to normal life. First their father dies, and then their
mother. The loss of their mother leaves them without relatives; so to avoid being
separated they keep her death a secret and bury her in a trunkful of wet cement in
the basement. From then on, it's all regression and decay. Garbage spills across the
kitchen floor, food rots and flies swarm. The cement in the basement develops a
crack and the presence of the body becomes increasingly obvious. Tom, the little
brother, first transforms himself into a girl and then into a baby in a crib, and Jack and
his older sister develop a sexual relationship that makes them seem, paradoxically,
almost as infantile as Tom. Even the neighborhood grows starker, as the prefabs
crumble and fall away. By the end, we're left with four stripped, empty characters and
not a shred of hope.
In one sense, this is an easy novel to read. The story skims along, and the style is so
direct that we have no trouble accepting the fact that it's a 15-year-old speaking. Jack
is articulate but never precious; he succeeds all too well in letting us into his numbed,
frozen world. "Except for the times I go down into the cellar," he says, "I feel like I'm
asleep. Whole weeks go by without noticing, and if you asked me what happened
three days ago I wouldn't be able to tell you." He wanders through a burnt-out
building and discovers a mattress in a bedroom. "The people who slept on that
mattress, I thought, really believed they were in 'the bedroom.' They took it for
granted that it would always be so." And when his sisters, in one short-lived burst of
energy, set a conventional meal upon the table, he's surprised that "There was a
chair for each plate. . .as if we were real people."
