The Cement Garden

I think I’ve said it before, but Ian McEwan’s books tend to fall into one of two tropes.  Firstly, there’s The Guardian reader gets into a spot of bother type, this is contrasted by the semi-anonymous protagonist gets into significantly more trouble but essentially the plot goes nowhere type.  Also there’s Atonement.  The Cement Garden falls into the second category and it’s a solid Ian McEwan book.  I don’t think I’ve ever read anything of his that I’ve truly loved or hated.  He’s good and he’s consistent.  That’s really all I’ve ever had to say about him.

The Cement Garden is the story of four children who become orphans shortly before the school summer holidays.  For a book concerned with their orphanhood, it takes a bloody long time for their mother to die.  Their father snuffs it rather quickly some years before while our narrator, Jack, is busy masturbating in the bathroom.  He achieves orgasm for the first time just as his father is dying in the garden, tying up a “becoming the man of the house” metaphor so neatly there may as well be a bow on it.  Anyway, once both parents have shuffled off this mortal coil, the kids hide the corpse as part of a pact to remain together.  Jack and his older sister Julie take on the role of mother and father and then incest ensues.  Nothing else happens.

I’m not being fair to the book.  Julie and Jack were toeing the incest line long before their parents died.  It’s one of the things that makes me assume this book was based largely on McEwan’s time at the University of East Anglia.  Norfolk is well known as the incest region of the British Isles and apparently (at least, according to the guy who sits next to me at work) there have been proper studies done that do actually show Norfolk has higher rates of incest than anywhere else in the country.  Combine this with an unnatural love of concrete and the only logical conclusion is UEA.  For those of you unfamiliar with the campus, I’ve included a visual aid. 

The problem with the book is that it doesn’t show the descent into depravity and desperation that could come from being orphaned and left without any adult supervision for the summer.  The kids are already weird long before they are orphans and so, rather than proper character development, the book seems to just contain dissociated moments as Jack drifts through life.  The only character from outside the family isn’t exactly normal either.  Julie’s boyfriend is a much older “professional” snooker player.  When he notices something’s up and the whole house smells of corpse, the orphans tell him it’s a dead dog.  He knows it’s their mum and rather than calling the police, he just plays along getting increasingly more offended that they won’t tell him the truth.  The fact that Derek just goes with it means there’s no contrast for what’s happening in the orphans’ house.

I get that everything I’ve just said about The Cement Garden is negative.  I didn’t hate this book, though.  I just kind of nothinged it.  It’s not a book that goes anywhere, but McEwan is a good writer.  Not very much is happening but it’s a well written not very much.  I think that’s what I’m trying to say.  Even if I don’t like McEwan’s stories; I like the man’s style.  This is the last of his books that I’ve come to on The List and it’s not the best of exits.  If anything, it’s left me wishing that there could be one more book of McEwan’s to go.  But I guess, ultimately, that’s what the revised and updated versions of The List are for.

My next book is Michel Houllebecq’s Platform.