As a new year’s resolution, I’m reading more novels and keeping better track of them. My first novel of the year was a short but good one: The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, one of my favorite authors (and I’m not saying that because the film, Atonement, is currently getting so much attention). The novel is in two parts: (1) four children experience the disintegration of their family structure as their parents die; and (2) the children create their own family while keeping the secret that their parents are dead and their mother’s body is decaying in the basement.
The Cement Garden has been compared with Lord of the Flies, and I was expecting more overt violence and cruelty because of that comparison. But the darkness was quieter, focusing on the older boy in the family, Jack, a teenager who is so dissociated from his emotions (aside from anger) that he believes the stench of his mother’s rotting body is his own. He is unable to process his love/lust for his older sister, Julie, and his jealousy when she brings home a boyfriend who “wants in” on their secret. Though Jack tries, he cannot communicate with his younger sister, Sue, a sensitive bookworm, or his very young brother, Tom, whom the sisters dress up as a girl during the novel’s second half. This further throws off the gender struggles that cause so much tension in this section.
McEwan is a master of psychology, and in this book especially, of making abnormal psychology and a very abnormal sitiuation understandable. He ventures into places that many other authors couldn’t. And while some readers might write off this book as being “weird” (or even “perverse”), I recommend it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is McEwan’s beautiful writing and his ability to render such a disturbing world as plausible and fascinating. I also recommend it for McEwan fans: The Cement Garden is one of his earlier books, published in 1978, and it’s interesting to see how his writing has evolved into Booker prize quality over the years. Finally, the novel is so unique that you might not get an opportunity to examine such a strange lifestyle, and have sympathy for its participants, anywhere else.
The Cement Garden was made into a film in 1993, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and directed by Andrew Birkin. I just added it to my Netflix queue.
