Ian McEwan “The Cement Garden”
Monday, February 25th, 2008 | Book Reviews
“I did not kill my father”, that´s the very first sentence of this peculiar book!
What follows, is a couple of events which don´t seem to be normal at all.
There is a family with four children. Two girls and two boys. The father is a dominating person in this family and everyone has to obbey him. One day father buys a sack of cement and while cementing their garden, he dies from a heart-attack “his head resting on the newly spread concrete”. What a relief!!
Jack, admires his older sister. They play doctor-games with their little sister Sue.
“We looked into her mouth and between her legs with a torch and found the little flower made of flesh.” Soon Jack starts mastrubating almost every morning in the bathroom. Some weeks after their dad died, mother becomes bed-ridden and stays in bed all day long, then she dies. She orders not to tell anybody, when she dies, because then the four siblings would be separated and would lose their house.
One would expect deep sorrow and tears of the children. No! No tears (except of the little boy Paul)! The oldest girl Julie has to take the responsibility. They decide to bury mother in the cellar in a trunk which they cover with rests of father´s cement.
The older silblings Julie and Jack become surrogate parents of Sue and Tom.
Tom is hysterical and wants to be a girl then a baby. Jack is doing nothing at all and refuses to wash himself. Sue is in her room writing and reading something. Julie has a new boy friend, who is rich andobliging. Jack is distracted and jalous. It seems as if the four orphans have completly forgotten how it is to have a mother and a father. Nobody talks about this subject and about the future.
There is a strong smell in the house. When they go down into the cellar, the conrete over mother´s “grave” is broken up. To Derek they improve a story about a dead dog, they´ve burried in the cellar. Mother is covered with cement again.
Julie keeps distance to Derek who urges to move into their house.
The climax and the turning point of this, in my opinion, perverted story, is a sex-scene between Julie and her brother Jack. Derek catches them, while they are examining their bodies.
“As I closed my lips around Julie´s nipple a soft shudder ran through her body and a voice from across the room said mournfully, `Now I´ve seen it all`”
“ `Why didn´t you tell me?´ I felt Julie shrug. Then she said, Actually, it´s none of your buisness.´ ”
This book is nothing special if you read it and don´t try to figure out why it´s actually written and what is it really about. It´s surreal in a way. In my opinion it is very close to Freud´s theories and I´m sure that McEwan is quite familiar with his work. The examples which McEwen uses to show difficulties of young sexual identity are certainly very exaggarated and that´s why this book immpressed me in a negativ way. It wasn´t pleasant for me to read .
This book is full of metaphors or rather it is actually a parable. The title “Cement Garden” is a symble for this stiff atmosphere in the house and in the souls of the children. It stands also for the education they got from their father. Education is like the foundation out of cement to build a house on it.
1 Comment to Ian McEwan “The Cement Garden”
Now I know what about the story is and think that I don’t like it too. 
February 26, 2008