The Cement Garden

I fell in love with the film and so was deeply relieved when I finally read the book and found out it was even better.

While there’s a horrendous moral misstep that sets things in motion, what I love is how well it captures that timeless, uncertain, motes-of-dust-in-the-sunlight feeling of a teenage, British summertime.

As the protagonists’ small, crumbling world slowly disintegrates around them, McEwan, the genius that he is, finds a universal sense of adolescent instability that keeps you on his side as things go horribly awry. 

This novel is a story of love gone wrong. Four siblings have secrets and a need to survive. Death, incest, and lack of boundaries define the family after the death of their parents. How much do we learn from our family about right and wrong? Why is their moral compass lost? Or did they ever have one? Fascinating study of family dynamics and the tragic effects that bad parenting can create.

Ian McEwan’s first novel, it’s about a family of siblings left to their own devices after they lose both parents in a matter of weeks, hiding the fact from the authorities and subsisting in a strange existence of their own making. A disturbing coming-of-age tale that explores teenage angst and discontent, while toeing the line of that most forbidden of family taboos that shall remain unnamed, since it’s so easy to reduce this novel to being about just that. There is tenderness and deep emotion here, for sure, but it’s played quietly and between the lines. I’ve read it many… show more.