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 16, 14 year old Jack, Sue (12) and their little brother Tom, aged 6, try to learn to cope on their own following the death of both their parents.

The story commences with the four children living in an isolated house with their mother and father. They seem to have no other family or friends and no near neighbours, but they live within walking distance of a town where the children go to school and where shopping is done. The children have close relationships with each other but less so with their parents, with their father especially coming across as a remote and emotionally detached figure. The sense of isolation is reflected in the fact that McEwan gives the reader very little information or insight about the parents but concentrates almost exclusively on the thoughts and actions of the children.

The father dies suddenly 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.

Eventually, the mother is confined to bed and too ill to carry on, gives up control of the household to her eldest daughter Julie. Julie totally takes over the "mother role", shopping, cleaning, cooking, caring for the younger children and making all household decisions. The family survives on Social Security benefits payable to the mother, which Julie collects from the Post Office in the nearby town.

One day the children arrive home from school and find their mother dead. Heeding all too literally her dire warnings about their being split up if they get "taken into care", the children conceal the fact that their mother has died. They 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 and carry on their family life in exactly the same way as they did while their mother was ill.

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 Julie starts to resent the restrictions that her situation has imposed on her and starts to crave her independence. As she develops into a young woman she attracts the attention of an older man called Derek. She flirts with Derek, but keeps him at what she considers a safe distance - but Derek wants more from their relationship. Eventually she invites Derek back to the house and the children's world is turned upside down...

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...

I couldn't put this book down, so it's just as well that it's short!

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 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 of all of McEwan's novels, The Cement Garden is my favourite!

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 Child In Time" by Ian McEwan on Amazon - available in hardback, paperback, audio and Kindle format

The Cement Garden from Amazon.com
Amazon reader review:
"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."

The Cement Garden (Paperback)