The Cement Garden

The Psychological Meaning of Social Normalcy

The Cement Garden is the gripping story of a small family, artificially isolated from society, and struggling with events others would consider normal, and which the rest of us in society maintain 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 have no clue how to handle her show more 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, handled very deftly given its nature.

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, 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 could really have been, 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. Inquisitive readers will be able judge for themselves.

P.S. One minor complaint: I have heard the movie omits the book's last paragraph, which I think was wise. The author might have withheld 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 on their own. I just think that, as a matter of style, it might have been left a bit unfinished. We're only talking about one paragraph, anyway. show less

The Cement Garden feels like an apocalyptic work even though it's strictly not. When their mother dies, four children bury her in cement in the basement rather than risk being put in an orphanage. Jack narrates, and although he never explicitly says it, the narrative is driven by his lust for his sister Julie. Early on, he and Julie play with their sister Sue's body; he begs Julie to take her clothes off and be next. She doesn't, but it sets up a time-bomb that only goes off in the last couple of pages when he finally does get his older sister's clothes off and mor

McEwan's first novel, published when he was only 30. (It was preceded by an even more shocking collection of short stories, "First Love, Last Rights", https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/31647778.)

A profoundly disturbing, but very well written book. Had I realised the true nature of it, I doubt I would have read it, and somehow the fact it is told in such an unjudgemental way almost makes it worse.

"I did not kill my father, but I sometimes think I helped him on his way", is the opening sentence. It is set in a hot summer in late '70s England. Four children live a rather isolated life in a very insular and not entirely happy family. Their father dies, and not long after, so does their mother (this much is mentioned in the blurb), show more leaving them to fend for themselves and each other. Tom is 5 or 6, Sue 12, Jack (the narrator) turns 15 and Julie about 16 or 17.

Bereaved, fearful, lonely, unprepared, bored (school holidays), directionless, coupled with puberty and sibling squabbles. Each tries different coping strategies, none of which really work: shy Julie (previously with a reputation for "disruptive, intimidating quietness") takes charge, Sue reads and also writes a diary, Tom regresses (a cot delivers "an enveloping pleasure in being tenderly imprisoned"), and Jack... retreats and masturbates. But those behaviours are trivial in comparison to other actions.

They lose sense of time, self and not just right and wrong, but what the rest of the world would judge as right and wrong: "Nor could I think whether what we had done was an ordinary thing to do, understandable even if it had been a mistake, or something so strange that if it was ever found out it would be the headline of every newspaper in the country... every thought I had dissolved into nothing."

I found the story gripping and oddly credible, and yet I was appalled by it too - a little like Lolita. show less

I looked at this book as a bit of a curiosity. I'd heard of it mainly from Charlotte Gainsbourg's having starred in the film adaptation and also as one of the earlier novels of Ian Mcewan. I read it in one sitting (in terms of length it feels more like a novella than a full fledged novel, but that's not to its detriment) after completing a final for my master's program and found its macabre darkness a nice leveling out from the incredible positiveness I had been feeling from the class (yes, such things in my mind need to be equalized).

In terms of plot it's very basic and couched very comfortably in the gothic and the bizarre. Almost Faulknerian, it begins with incest and goes from there. Death, grime, psychological and emotional unease show more manifesting in mood swings and ambiguous gender confusion, and a superficial nihilism hiding just behind the entropy and decay of this collapsing family all add to the proceedings making it a masterful portrait of declination and eroding misery.

I'd say there was a dark kind of beauty to the text but there really isn't. This is an unabashedly gross and lurid story that, though not quite reveling in its grossness and taboo shattering it's at ease enough with it to treat it in an almost flip manner. For many as I understand it this created an even more acute sense of unease but for me, really, after reading the likes of Faulkner, Ellis, Cooper, I was honestly taken in and felt I was made a witness to the fascinatingly depraved and filthily dark corner of Mcewan's words. There's no 'condoning' or 'condemning' here but rather a frank description of the kinds of things many if not most would prefer to pretend don't exist.

If this were just poorly written schlock, exploitative and lurid garbage, it wouldn't have received four stars from me (plus I'd be wondering how the hell a renowned writer like Mcewan would write something like that) but it did and there's a simple reason. Mcewan, based solely on this book (this is my first sampling his literature and I very much look forward to his later works) seems to me one of the greatest prose stylists in the English canon. I mean, god damn, his word choice and power of description (filling out details with never a wrong word choice) is second only to Phillip Roth...even possessing a coolness and level of control that Mr. Roth lacks (though, again, not to the latter's detriment, just a bit of difference).

So, if you can surmount the content, read this based on the verbiage and the purity of its prose...made somehow purer when juxtaposed with the macabre decay described so elegantly. show less

What do 3 teenagers with a younger brother do when their mother dies soon after their father. After setting up a complete isolate family in a house removed by urban decay from any close neighbors, the author takes them through a record hot summer on their own. It isn't quite the incestuous [Lord of the Flies] of the blurb, but it isn't pretty.

The back cover of my paperback copy of this book features a quote from the Washington Post asserting this book has the "chilling impact of Lord of the Flies". This got my attention. Could McEwan go there? I had my doubts. Yes he is challenging, yes he goes to difficult places but Lord of the Flies goes to the darkest of places. It makes us question the goodness of man. That doesn't sound like McEwan. I was wrong.

Like Lord of the Flies, this one sneaks up on you. It doesn't undermine faith in man but it does make us question how does things can go awry. The focus here is more narrow, a family unit. In this case a father, a mother, an oldest daughter, a son, another daughter and a very young son. Importantly they have virtually no show more connections to the rest of the world other than the kids going to school. There is bleakness around them. Their neighborhood has deteriorated. The houses around them have been knocked down in preparation for a development which never develops. Closest to them are tower blocks which I believe is the British equivalent of what we in the U.S. would call public projects. Institutions of questionable value and likely deteriorating visibly. Hardly an ennobling environment.

The father is detached, authoritarian and often issuing edicts which his wife resists but he persists. He has had heart problems and is focused on surrounding the house with a cement ring and a garden area. In the process of building this he dies of a heart attack. Not much of a loss. His wife carries on and the kids are somewhat protective of her. She assigns them roles. They all need to take care of the youngest brother. The oldest daughter is made her deputy but she wants the oldest son to know he shares the role but while she lets her son know that's her expectation it's not clear she has explained that to the oldest daughter. Mother gets increasingly ill and the kids are left to take care of themselves. She prepares them to be ready to take care of themselves while she goes to the hospital but she dies in her sleep before she ever goes to the hospital.

How the kids react to this is central to this story. Earlier we had a hint of how they interact when the parents were away at a funeral. The older sister and brother played doctor with the younger daughter. Playing doctor seemed just to be a quite normal rite of passage but the sexual tension with the older siblings seemed to be just under the surface. But with their mother's death the kids seem to have a reasonable reaction to being parentless. They wondered who should they tell? They realized that authorities might split them up and even take the youngest away from them and put him in to foster care of some sort. If the kids were taken away what would happen to the house? If no one lived there they feared it would succumb to the fate of the rest of the abandoned structures in the neighborhood, even being burned to the ground. They decide it's too dangerous to tell anyone. Their mother had prepared them to rely on themselves and that's what they need to do to prevent things getting even worse. Sounds reasonable. Isn't that what you would want?

But the downsides quickly appear. What should be done with mother? The body begins to smell and locking her in her room does not address the real problem. They decide they have to bury her but if they do it outside people will see what's happening. They decide to bury her in a chest in the basement covered with the cement that father had purchased to make his garden. That buys some time, But no one takes responsibility for keeping everything clean. Personal hygiene suffers. Eventually that is addressed. The young boy wants to dress as a girl. Not that disturbing in today's world but it goes further. He wants to play dress up with his friend. Soon he wants to be babied and have the older sister act as his mother. The older brother wonders whether this was the young kid's idea or was the result of the eldest sister encouraging this.

What bursts this bubble is when an outsider enters this world. The oldest daughter attracts a young man. Somehow he learns about the secret in the basement. He wants to go along but he is uncomfortable with them not trusting him. Cracks appear and the basement begins to smell. He's ready to take a sledge hammer to the chest. But what sends him over the edge is when he catches the older daughter sexualizing her relationship with her brother, something she has denied him. The circus ends with him blowing the whistle. We never learn exactly how but it's clear the game is up. McEwan leaves it up to the reader to decide what happens next. Fascinating. show less

This packs a lot into its short length. Its pretty dark and disturbing, but also weirdly all seems inevitable. The objectively horrible things that happen are dealt with in such a matter of fact way that you sympathise with the children. Its really powerfully written, but understated.