Soon, an incestuous relationship develops between the two oldest children as they seek to emulate their parents roles. To avoid being taken into custody, they bury their mother in the cement of the basement and attempt to carry on life as normally as possible. McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is the story of four orphaned children living alone after the death of both parents. These stories-claustrophobic tales of childhood, deviant sexuality and disjointed family life-were remarkable for their formal experimentation and controlled narrative voice. A second volume of his work appeared in 1978. We understand through McEwan that home is not to be defined by anyone else but it is, instead, what you know and have known that makes you feel safe, even if it is rather dangerous and macabre.įirst Love, Last Rites was McEwan's first published book and is a collection of short stories that in 1976 won the Somerset Maugham Award. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions (like what is buried beneath the cement pile, etc), surely threatening the status quo (however morbid) that the children have come to accept as 'normal' and as 'home'.

And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, the narrator who is entering adolescence with all of its curiosity and appetites that he must contend with (along with the sure confusion of what the children have done).

Ll of the children are free thinking independent-minded teenagers. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. The father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. So it is with The Cement Garden, the story of dying family who live in a dying part of the city. Ian McEwan is known to skirt the edge with his writing the fringes of society, to test the limits of what we can handle perhaps in our worlds as we bring his writing home with us and allow a whole new being to enter.

Book the cement garden