It’s been a busy day, but I finished an audiobook that I borrowed from the library: The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan. And boy, what a journey that novella is. I don’t have much time today, so we’re going to do a bullet point post…
- Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories
- I have a checkered history with McEwan, mostly positive – I love Black Dogs, Amsterdam, and Atonement. I like On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. I thought Saturday was pretty bad, and I haven’t anything he’s published since 2007.
- The Cement Garden is narrated by Jack, aged 13 at the beginning, with an older sister, a younger sister, and a rather younger brother.
- Their father dies – and, a year later, their mother dies. Worried about being taken into care, they decide to encase her body in cement in the cellar – and then begin dysfunctionally living without any supervision.
- Jack’s voice is captivating and convincing, as a young man whose competing concerns make it hard for him to discern or prioritise between the everyday and the shocking.
- I think there’s a very good novella in here about a family of children failing to cope in a terrible situation, and the gradual falling apart of their fragile ecosystem (the addition of Julie’s boyfriend, Derek, is very good at expanding their world and showing how horribly flawed it is).
- But…
- Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children? What do Jack’s unexplained incestuous desires add to the novella? To me, they just make it self-consciously abhorrent, and detract from a subtler novella hiding within it.
- SO much of the book is preoccupied with bodily fluids, disgusting smells, masturbation – oh gosh, has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masturbation? It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.
- It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why. There is the promise of a novelist here, but covered over by the belief that the only way to be real is to be sordid. The sordid is no more real than the beautiful, Ian.
- Here is an excellent quote from Anne Tyler’s review in The New York Times: “these children are not – we trust – real people at all. They are so consistently unpleasant, unlikable and bitter that we can’t believe in them (even hardened criminals, after all, have some good points) and we certainly can’t identify with them. Jack’s eyes, through which we’re viewing this story, have an uncanny ability to settle upon the one distasteful detail in every scene, and to dwell on it, and to allow only that detail to pierce the cotton wool that insulates him. […] It seems weak-stomached to criticize a novel on these grounds, but if what we read makes us avert our gaze entirely, isn’t the purpose defeated?”
I probably haven’t read enough McEwan to do an Unnecessary Rankings! of him, but The Cement Garden would certainly be toying for bottom place.
Thanks for warning me about this book. It sounds horribly sordid. Hope your next novella is better.
thank you Sarah!
Ick.
I am so back and forth about McEwan, too.
Ick is the word!
When I read this, I was too inexperienced a reader to make judgements about what McEwan was doing with this novella, and why. (I didn’t really ‘get’ Lord of the Flies either, the first time I read it.)
What I remember of it was the horror of the body in the garden and the mechanics of how they actually did it.
I still haven’t read Lord of the Flies, somehow! And yes, I am either still too inexperienced to get it, or it’s an emperor’s new clothes situ… or maybe just the sort of easy shock that people admired at the time.
I read his early novel The Comfort of Strangers when it came out and concluded that McEwan’s imagination was not a place I wanted to be.
Other, better writers have written about degradation – Zola is the first to come to mind – but never with such intensity and, dare I say it, delight.
I like how you’ve phrased that! Yes, his imagination is now more a place I want to be, but not then…
I read this in sixth form and I remember so little about it now. I did go on to read other McEwans I enjoyed more but I’ve never been an avid reader of his.
I thought I remembered McEwan saying that there would be no more novels about incest, not even those in very bad taste; but I just checked and it turns out that was Julian Barnes – I frequently confuse the two!
Ha! I hadn’t realised Barnes had written any, but I was pretty underwhelmed by the two or three novels I read by him and haven’t any urge to go back.
“Masterbation” – the sport of kings!
Not sure if this is deliberately highlighting my spelling mistake or not, but thank you if so! It’s up there with the more confusing comments I’ve had on my blog :D
Um not for me. I’ve read one tiny McEwan book which I did like (My Purple Scented Novel) but this doesn’t appeal at all!
oh I haven’t heard of that one. I do love Black Dogs particularly, but his early stuff does seem particularly nasty
My first McEwan novel was Possession, which I adored; it turned me into an ardent fan (must admit, however, that I never got around to The Cement Garden). That ended with Saturday, which I honestly thought was a bit of a joke; I disliked it so much I haven’t read anything by McEwan since its publication around 2005-06. McEwan really is a wonderfully talented writer (I’m mostly o.k. with “dark” so that aspect of his work doesn’t bother me much) but somewhere along the way he just lost me!
I assume Atonement rather than Possession! (Though I do love A S Byatt sometimes.) And I can totally get that about Saturday – that was my second book by him and almost put me off for life.
There’s a real nastiness to much of McEwan’s early work! I prefer his softer, more recent stuff. On Chesil Beach is gorgeous, for instance. McEwan vs. Tyler is a fantastic clash of worldviews there.
Sorry for the accidental double comment. Feel free to delete this one!
There’s a real nastiness to much of McEwan’s early work. I prefer his softer, mid-period stuff. (On Chesil Beach is gorgeous, for instance.) McEwan vs. Tyler is a fantastic clash of worldviews there!
I thought that! You could hardly have found a novelist/critic less likely to enjoy McEwan’s approach in this, and I’m definitely Team Tyler.
“Ian McEwan’s first novel, after one or two volumes of short stories”
Two volumes – First Love, Last Rites; In Between the Sheets.
“and then begin dysfunctionally [sic] living without any supervision.”
Do they?
When John Carey included the novel in his list of the 100 best books of the 20th century, he argued that the children, in fact, coped better with the anguish of bereavement than our culture normally allows.
“Why does McEwan write such sordid scenes of incestuous sexual encounters between children”
The only sex scene is between consenting teenagers. And McEwan isn’t required to submit his plots in advance for vetting. Few people, surely, care for writers that put on rubber gloves to deal with their material. You create the plot, you follow it through wherever it goes. No chickening out.
“has any literary novelist ever written so obsessively about masterbation? [sic]”
Yes and his name was Philip Roth.
You are misspelling ‘masturbation’ as well.
“It all feels like a teenager desperately trying to be edgy by simply being unpleasant.”
Each to his own but to me it sounds more like someone accurately entering the mind of an adolescent boy, warts and all.
No sudden squeamishness, again.
“It got lauded by critics, but tbh it’s hard to tell why”
It wouldn’t if you read more than one negative review. I recommend starting with John Carey’s review (reprinted in Pure Pleasure, Faber and Faber 1999).
Go Anne Tyler! I didn’t like Amsterdam much and didn’t pick up anything else after him. When I saw the title of this one in my blog reader I thought, “Oh, no, poor Simon!” It’s done not in the house as it’s an audio book, at least (but worse read out, I reckon, than seen).
I didn’t like it either.