Bleak house: Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden
Hibernia November 9th 1979
To readers of Mr McEwan’s previous two books, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, the territory covered by this, his first novel will be somewhat familiar. There is a crystallisation of his preoccupations in the stories – guilt, incest, urban waste – in a tightly controlled narrative and setting, at once contemporary and bizarre.
The tale is bleak indeed. It concerns the activities of four children – two boys and two girls – in a soon-to-be-condemned house somewhere in suburbia. Early on in the novel the parents have been dispatched, the mother rather ceremoniously, to a trunk in the cellar and buried in cement. This burial by the children provides the central image of the story which blossoms and festers as it progresses, in the manner of the weeds between the cracks in the garden. It also established a tug-chord of guilt to which all the characters relate. They are a motley crew who degenerate into physical and moral decrepitude almost as fast as the decaying corpse which gives off its odours in the cellar: Jack, the narrator and masturbator extraordinaire; Tom, a six-year-old transvestite prancing in front of the house’s mirrors; Julie, the eldest, manipulative and assuming the mother role to the point of incest; Sue, who retires to her room to record the family’s decline.
Mr McEwan’s images are extraordinarily vivid. They are morbid and grotesque but yet exert a fascination and attraction rather like freaks in a sideshow. His irony carries off the most ill-assorted happenings with an unnoticed ease so that gradually the elements of fantasy and off-beat sexuality assume the pose of normality, become comfortably at home.
Childhood is depicted without nostalgia, nor is it falsified by innocence. The language of need, curiosity and guilt corrects love. This is somewhat akin to Cocteau’s universe in Les enfants terribles. As the stains accumulate on the sheets, the garbage in the kitchen, and the cracks in the cement, the children’s betrayer takes the form of a rich, slick, confident pool-hall champion. Ironically, the world outside the house appears none too healthy either; high-rise flats stained by damp, levelled pre-fabs, the hazards of the schoolyard.
A bleak vision and not without a grain of truth and a stunted beauty. It is a world bordering on fantasy, as its last line suggests, and its tableaux linger long after the book has been put down.