I'm not entirely sure why though. I last read On Chesil Beach for English Literature at A Level, and I wasn't particularly impressed. I can't remember, in fact, anyone other than my teacher liking the book particularly. Parts of it felt sluggish and unnecessary, and for a book that was focussed very much in the moment - it's heavy use of flashbacks to fill in the story felt out of place and not very interesting at all. (For those who don't know, it's about a married couple in 1962 on their wedding night. One of them, Edward, is very keen to finally lose his virginity, and Florence, his new wife, is definitely not. It doesn't end well.) I can confess that a lot of us skipped to the bits set in the 'present', because the backstory just didn't grab us.
Yet after this, my interest remained in the author. One draw is perhaps that he was one of the first to do UEA's English Literature and Creative Writing course. I think the main draw is probably just that the books look so good. They feel 'grown up', essentially, and they feel gentle and really quite posh. Plus, books with embossed text on the front are always lovely. So maybe it's that.
With this in mind, I was randomly searching for books (I've done that a lot this summer) and found myself investigating McEwan's pretty vast portfolio. This led me to The Cement Garden, a book about four teenagers who slowly descend into a weird twisted spiral of... stuff. I should point out, as one of the first books McEwan wrote, I'm going to discuss "spoilers" and full plot details. However, I knew the full plot before I started the book - and I still got to the end. So even if you haven't read it and want to read this, it doesn't matter too much.
In The Cement Garden, the parents of four children die. It's the 1960s, as with On Chesil Beach, and the book is narrated by Jack, the second oldest sibling. His older sister, Julie, is, in Jack's opinion, rather pretty. He has a younger sister, Sue, who matures a lot through the book (although I'm tempted to call it a "novella"), and Tom, a six year old who likes dressing up as a girl. The father of the children, a grumpy and brisk man that you would expect to find in a book about a family in the 1960s, dies first. He's bought a great deal of cement for the garden to finally create the landscape he's dreamed of. After this, the mother eventually grows weaker and takes to bed. The children's lives begin to centre around her in the bed, until the moment that she also dies.
They then bury her in a trunk in the cellar, using the leftover cement, and the cellar becomes the centre of the children's lives. Threaded throughout the book, especially the latter half, are references to a "sleep", where the children drift through the house until the moments they visit the cellar, when they suddenly feel awake and connected to the world again. Time passes greatly and without being defined, and the long passages of prose give a sense of a lucid dream that the children find themselves in.
"Lucid" is a good word for the book as a whole. In the decades between writing The Cement Garden and On Chesil Beach, I don't feel McEwan has changed that much at all. They're both novellas, of about the same length, and both set in the 1960s, so they're relatively easy to compare. Although On Chesil Beach is focussed on the one moment with flashbacks, where as The Cement Garden pulls through time quite easily, with references to the past. The prose style is very much the same. Elaborate but not particularly stuffy or suffocating. The words do occasionally drag on, but less so in The Cement Garden. The majority of the prose is interesting and feels important. I'm still not convinced Jack wandering round not demolished and later demolish prefabs is that important, mind.
The writing is similar in lots of other ways as well, and not all of them good. McEwan seems to present men (and boys) who have a constant obsession with sex. Both Jack in The Cement Garden and Edward in On Chesil Beach think about it a great deal. Edward just seems childish, but it fits Jack, who's growing up. Even still, there do seem to be too many references to it. In a way that's good, because McEwan chooses not to shy away from anything within Jack's psyche. He's not the most straightforward character, he has outbursts of anger and he seems distanced from just about everything, yet this is presented in a believable way. In a way, it's not good, because it just feels like McEwan is focussing on the wrong aspects of the character.
The prose is inviting and sort of warm, which means that some moments feel more uncomfortable. This feeling is both good and bad. By having prose that's warm, it makes the less expected moments to stand out and feel as they ought to. But it occasionally also jars with the prose. There's one moment where Jack, not adverse to a bit of swearing, is narrating in the elaborate way that
Though Jack is a distinct character, I don't think he's as well developed as characters like Julie or Sue. They appear as complex characters, hovering in Jack's sight but never fully engaging - much like the murky tower blocks seen from the back garden of the house. There's a greater distance between the siblings as the book goes on. This gap is further widened by Jack's refusal, for about three quarters of the book, to wash. It's tiny details like that, and the flies described in the kitchen, and McEwan's constant use of smells, that mark how enclosed the characters become after the death of their parents. They don't want to alert anyone or they'll be taken into care, so they keep it a secret, and they grow into themselves.
As a system, I don't think it's disastrous. There are the expected problems - the failings to wash or clean up as one example - but they don't seem to ever really struggle. Tom cries a lot, though this is more for attention than to express actual grief. The subject of their parents goes unmentioned, and Julie becomes the mother, distributing money and buying food. Apart from the squalor, the kids don't really seem to struggle. In that sense, the book also feels like it's drifting. It drifts from one moment in Jack's mind to another - and they're often similar moments. Thoughts about Julie and Sue, or sex, or Julie's boyfriend Derek, and then occasionally to the state of the house. The challenge, in a way, never seems difficult enough for them. They manage.
That brings me onto Derek. He's a strange character. For me, the trip he and Jack take to the snooker club seems out of place. It's as if it was suddenly decided the characters needed to leave the house to expand the story. But they don't. The effectiveness of the book, the engaging quality I found within it, is that characters like Jack feel stuck in the house. It's what they do and how they cope within that situation that's interesting. Going to the club felt slow, almost as if "teenagers need to threaten Jack at some point" was a tick box for a book containing anyone under 18. It wasn't needed and was useful purely for a few lines of Derek's questioning about what was in the trunk. It's noted by Sue at the close of the novel that Derek, who's twenty-three, knew all along about the mother in the cellar. Yet he didn't do anything. There's no sense of threat, he's just a bit irritating about the whole thing. It's only the end that he finally becomes a truly useful character.
A twenty-three year old snooker player feels strangely out of kilter with the rest of the book anyway. He's too world wise, too knowledgeable. Perhaps this is a deliberate contrast to the clueless children - who aren't really all that clueless. But he brings a sense of the outside world that doesn't fit with the rest of the book. He remains as a permanent outside feature, an outcast in the house, to the extent where he's just not as interesting as what is going in between the siblings in the house. Despite the repetition of moments in Jack's psyche, it's still fascinating to see where it will go next. Derek just comes along and (metaphorically) puts a snooker cue in the works.
The twisted spiral the children fall into, or the "strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves" the blurb promises don't really reach their full potential. All they do to fend for themselves is go to the shops to buy food, dress Tom up as a girl, and think. Julie gets a boyfriend, who poses no real threat, and the only truly unsettling act happens at the very end of the book. It feels like the book could have done a lot more, it could have been to more places - and yet it kept enclosed. This enclosed feel works - after all, it's mainly a book about four people staying in one house - but the enclosed nature never feels scary or unsettling. Just a bit weird, on occasion.
The end of the book sees Julie and Jack have sex. This was kind of inevitable (or more for me as I knew it happened), and it does feel like the most unsettling moment of the book. It feels as if now, the characters are finally forming unnatural bonds in their solitude. It's finally having an effect. The most extreme thing Jack does prior to this is strip out his room and shove everything in a wardrobe. (In fact, the game that Sue, Jack and Julie play at the start of the book feels more extreme than anything that happens after their parents have died.) It's perhaps because everything in the book is normalised and rationalised by Jack that it doesn't feel as extreme as it could. But it does feel as if the book definitely did have more potential than was explored.
In summary, The Cement Garden is overall a good and engaging book. I wanted to know what would happen, how they would cope, and books that explore and push relationships are always the most interesting for me. It's the psychology of the book that is most fascinating. The prose, if a little tiresome at times, makes the book feel complicated yet simple. It's developed and elaborate, which (on the whole) only draws you into the world more. However - it does have the tendency to feel like a weird fanfiction at times. The weirder moments tend to be, in the majority, misplaced, and it feels like the children could have been pushed further in the course of the book (as sadistic as that sounds). Despite the fact it doesn't reach its potential, it is undeniably fascinating to read, and McEwan has a very strong sense of character. Fundamentally, what I would say I loved about the book, is that the characters do get so thoroughly examined. Even if the events don't live up to what I expected, the characters (again, on the whole) do. Even if that sense of (male) character doesn't change much in the decades McEwan's been writing for.
I would be interesting in reading more of his though. Then I could tell you if the male characters were all like that.
7/10
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