The Cement Garden - a novel by Ian McEwan
The Cement Garden" is the first novel written by award-winning British author, Ian McEwan. It was originally published in 1978.
The Cement Garden is a beautifully woven, but very dark tale of childhood and lost innocence...
The plot of The Cement Garden centres around a group of four children, Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom aged between 6 and 17.
Their father dies of a heart attack whilst laying a cement path in the family's garden and soon afterwards, their mother becomes ill. Fearing that she may have to go into hospital, she encourages the eldest, Julie, to look after the other children, run the household and deal with financial matters.
The family have no near neighbours and the mother avoids seeing a doctor, so when she dies, no-one knows apart from the children. They take the decision not to tell anyone else rather than risk having to leave their home...so they find a use for the cement left unused when their father died, hide their mother's body in the cellar of the house and carry on as normal...at least for a while...
I was hooked straightaway and read the whole book in one sitting. The plot is on very similar lines to Julian Gloag's 1966 novel, "Our Mothers House" - the two books share a common theme of a group of children left to deal with the sudden death of a parent and their desire to conceal their orphaned status from the world for fear of being split up...
The Cement Garden is quite different to Ian McEwan's later works, such as Atonement, but I loved the book and highly recommend it.
A film version of The Cement Garden was made in 1992. The film stars Sinead Cusack, Andrew Robertson and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
In March 2008, The Cement Garden was adapted for the stage by FallOut Theatre in Cambridge.
"The Cement Garden" - Contents
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan - novel
- The Cement Garden Quotes
- Plot Summary Of "The Cement Garden"
- Did YOU Enjoy "The Cement Garden"?
- More Reviews Of "The Cement Garden"
- The Cement Garden Movie Trailer
- The Cement Garden Quotes
- "What It Feels Like For A Girl" - From The Cement Garden Film
- The Cement Garden Movie Clip 1
- The Cement Garden Movie Clip 2
- The Cement Garden Movie Clip 3
- The Cement Garden Links
- More About The Author Of The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
- More About The Cement Garden
- The Cement Garden On Twitter
- "The Cement Garden" Feedback
The Cement Garden Quotes
"It was not at all clear to me now why we had put her in the trunk in the first place.
At the time it had been obvious, to keep the family together.
Was that a good reason?
It might have been more interesting to be apart.
Nor could I think whether what we had done was an ordinary thing to do..."
The Cement Garden - The Family
Plot Summary Of "The Cement Garden"
Synopsis of The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
"The Cement Garden" is set in England during the sweltering heatwave in the summer of 1976.
Four children, Julie aged 17, 14 year old Jack, Sue (12) and their little brother Tom, aged 6, try to learn to cope with being left on their own, following the death of both their parents.
Their father dies of a heart attack whilst laying a cement path in the garden. Soon afterwards, their mother begins suffering from unexplained tiredness. She does not consult a doctor as, without anyone else to look after the children, she worries that they will be taken into care of the Social Services if she has to go into hospital. As her illness progresses, the mother delegates control of the household to her eldest daughter Julie. Julie learns to look after the children and handle all the shopping, cooking and financial matters. She instructs the children to tell no-one else about her illness as she does not want "outsiders" taking the children away if it is thought that she is unable to look after them.
Eventually, the mother dies and heeding all too literally her dire warnings about their being split up if they get "taken into care", the children conceal their "adult free" status from the eyes of the world.
They do this in a resourceful (if a little unusual) way - the children carry their mother's body down to the cellar and put it in an old trunk. They then encase the trunk in cement using the materials left over from the path their father was building when he suffered his fatal heart attack.
They have no other family or friends and their house is isolated from any neighbours, so the children just carry on family life as normal. They don't tell anyone that their mother is dead and Julie continues collecting her mother's social security benefit and using the money to pay for the shopping and bills.
Over time, the four children fall naturally (or should that be un-naturally?) into the "roles" left vacant by the missing adults and a new nuclear family unit is formed, safe and secure from those who might threaten it's stability...this works surprisingly well on the surface...until one day, the eldest daughter brings a stranger home...
The story is seen through the eyes of the eldest boy Jack, a 14 year old, trapped in the limbo between childhood and becoming a man...he is emotionally detached, secretive and very unsure of his place in the world and his fast changing relationships with those around him. Controlled by his dawning sexuality, Jack escapes to an inner fantasy land filled with dreams of his dead parents, science fiction heroes and erotic fantasies about his eldest sister...fantasies that very soon overwhelm him and those around him...
The Cement Garden is disturbing, yet compelling...McEwan never stoops to gratuitous shock tactics...he doesn't need to...his writing is so "real" and so vivid, you feel that you're part of this sad little family with their dark secrets. Jack stumbles through events in a dreamlike state as though he is afraid that if he really starts to think about what is going on, the horror of it all will destroy him and everything he holds familiar...
I couldn't put this book down, so it's just as well that it's short!
The subject matter is thought provoking and the story is a dark one...yet it's really quite beautiful in it's own way....highly recommended!
The Cement Garden - The House
Did YOU Enjoy "The Cement Garden"?
More Reviews Of "The Cement Garden"
Links to websites offering reviews and plot summaries of The Cement Garden
- Cracking up | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
- Guardian Review of The Cement Garden
- New York Times
- New York Times Review of The Cement Garden
- Ian McEwan - The Cement Garden - Arts - Culture - The Yorker
- The Yorker review of The Cement Garden
The Cement Garden - Jack (Andrew Robertson)
The Cement Garden Novel
Cement Garden book
The Cement Garden
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"The Cement Garden has been likened to Golding's Lord of the Flies for its careful evocation of a society of young people, suddenly relieved of adult oversight, that evolves rapidly, opportunistically, organically in response to specific challenges posed by an unusual environment...The dreaded resolution of the relentlessly rising tension, carefully withheld until the closing pages, relieves narrative pressure but raises disturbing perspectives on love, the family, the "ties that bind."
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The Cement Garden - Julie (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
Essay - "The Cement Garden" By Ian McEwan
Shadows on the mind - Urban alienation and the mental landscape of the children in Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden by Nick Ambler
"...The novel opens with a sense of guilt and a feeling of unhappy self-containment which introduces the prevailing atmosphere of The Cement Garden. Jack, the fifteen year-old protagonist, with his masturbatory habits, lack of personal hygiene and 'attitude' is arguably fairly typical of a male adolescent. However McEwan distorts this possible normality by focusing on elements of physical bodily functions and darker mental processes which lends the children and the universe they inhabit the feeling of ordinary actions and responses becoming sordid, intense and grotesque.
The first sentence of the novel expresses Jack's feelings of reluctant guilt towards his father's death:
I did not kill my father, but I sometimes think that I helped him on his way. (p.9)...
Read the whole essay - LiteratureStudyOnline
The Cement Garden Movie Trailer
Trailer for The film The Cement Garden
The Cement Garden Quotes
"Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it's OK to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading.
But secretly you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you?
What it feels like for a girl?" - Julie
"What It Feels Like For A Girl" - From The Cement Garden Film
The Cement Garden - "what it feels like for a girl" scene from the film, The Cement Garen
The Cement Garden - What It Feels Like For a Girl
Excerpt from the 1993 movie "The Cement Garden" in which Charlotte Gainsbourg utters the quotation later used in Madonna's song "What It Feels Like For a Girl". The movie's screenplay is an adaptation of the homonymic book by Ian McEwan. Trecho do filme "O Jardim de Cimento", de 1993, em que a atriz Charlotte Gainsbourg declama a citação que viria a ser usada na canção "What It Feels Like For a Girl" da cantora Madonna. O filme é uma adaptação do livro homônimo de Ian McEwan.
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Madonna "What It Feels Like for a Girl"
Madonna quotes from "The Cement Garden"
The Cement Garden Film On Amazon UK
The Cement Garden movie
The Cement Garden [1992]DVD
"When a family of four fatherless children hide their mother's death to avoid going to an orphanage, the eldest two think they are capable of assuming the mature roles forced upon them. Parenthood and maturity, however, brings with it stronger urges--urges which brother Jack and sister Julie find hard to resist. This perversely compelling adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel was awarded 'Best Director' at the Berlin Film Festival."
The Cement Garden Film From Amazon USA
The Cement Garden movie
The Cement Garden
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"A bizarre and compelling story of family secrets based on the novel by Ian McEwan (who also wrote the novel upon which The Comfort of Strangers is based), this British film tells the complex tale of four children who conspire to hide their dead mother's body to avoid being split apart and sent to an orphanage. Their deception works for a while, as they become a self-sufficient family unit. Soon, however, mistrust and a deeply antagonistic relationship between the older siblings rife with sexual overtones, as well as a snooping suitor with designs on the older sister, threaten to destroy their well-constructed facade. Adapted and directed by Andrew Birkin, this offbeat film is disturbing but a riveting find for anyone interested in new discoveries from the world of international film. --Robert Lane "
The Cement Garden Movie Clip 1
The Cement Garden Movie Clip 2
The Cement Garden Movie Clip 3
The Cement Garden Links
Websites and articles about The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
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More About The Author Of The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
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Ian McEwan - British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, And Screenwriter
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Ian McEwan has been writing fiction since the 1970's and has written many bestsellers and received numerous literary awards and glowing critical acclaim. It is difficult to sum up Ian McEwan's writing...a few words and phrases spring to mind...
More About The Cement Garden
"The Cement Garden" On Wikipedia
The Cement Garden is a 1978 novel by Ian McEwan. It was adapted into a 1993 film of the same name by Andrew Birkin, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Andrew Robertson. A quote from the script (as spoken by Gainsbourg in the film) is featured in the introduction to the 2001 Madonna song "What It Feels Like for a Girl". It was included in the book Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005) by Stephen Jones .
The Cement Garden On Twitter
Tweets about The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
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- @serafinowicz The Collector by John Fowles, The Cement Garden/The Innocent both by Ian McEwan.
"The Cement Garden" Feedback
Have you read The Cement Garden? Would you like to read it? Share your thoughts here!
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- science_fiction_novels_cyberpunk science_fiction_novels_cyberpunk Nov 3, 2009 @ 6:24 am
- A beautiful lens about a fascinating book. Thank you for your suggestion! 5*****
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- Treasures-By-Brenda Treasures-By-Brenda Apr 14, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
- Great job writing this book up; I've just requested it from the library and I've blessed your lens.
Brenda
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- 0ctavias0fferings 0ctavias0fferings Apr 13, 2009 @ 9:28 am
- Thanks for highlighting this book in such a well constructed lens. I've been meaning to read this and now I will 5* and a sprinkling of Angel Dust
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- Beaman Beaman Mar 18, 2009 @ 6:55 am
- Very good lens. My favourite book of his is 'Saturday'. I tried to get through 'Atonement' but couldn't. I'll have to read this one of his.
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- GrowWear GrowWear Nov 22, 2008 @ 6:14 pm
- Sounds like my type of a good read! I have a vague memory of seeing the film version before -- must have been distracted at the time. Obviously, I need to read the book then watch the movie again. :)
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If You Liked "The Cement Garden", You Might Also Like..."Our Mother's House" By Julian Gloag (USA Customers)
"Our Mother's House" By Julian Gloag 1966
Our Mothers House
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"'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.'
When their Mother died at 5.58 one spring evening, her seven children buried her in the garden.
It was Elsa's idea, and she was thirteen and the eldest.
Lonely and frightened, faced with separation and the horrors of an unknown orphanage, they pretended to the outside world that she was ill, and could not be seen...
Scene by scene, nostalgic, comic, pathetic, terrible and tragic, the children live their constricted lives, moving from crisis to crisis..."
'a minor miracle' - Time
'ingenious in plot and beautiful in the telling' - Books and Bookmen
'a real spine-chiller' - Evening News
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