This is a weirdly compelling and readable book – its short length helps – and it’s pretty much a classic case of a debut novel, in that it’s well-written and objectively good, but ultimately pointless and unmemorable. Fearing that they will be split up and sent off to foster homes, the children conspire to hide her corpse in a trunk in the basement and cover it up with concrete. Some time later she grows ill and eventually dies of cancer. They have few outside friends and no outside relatives, the children are sexually experimenting with each other, and their mother confines herself to her bedroom after their father’s death. Their father dies early in the book of a heart attack, and it becomes clear that they are an odd and self-contained family unit. It follows a family of four children, narrated by the 13-year old Jack, his 16-year-old sister Julie, his 12-year-old sister Sue and their youngest brother, Tom, who I think was meant to be around primary school age. This is McEwan’s first novel, continuing my recent trend of inexplicably sampling new authors by reading their first and probably weakest books. But apart from the fact that it takes place over summer, The Cement Garden is certainly a grey and grimy novel, portraying macabre events on the outskirts of an unnamed town in a windswept, derelict neighbourhood where few houses remains standing. I don’t know, maybe the ’70s were just bleak everywhere.

But the cover of this edition of The Cement Garden is perhaps a perfect distillation of that sort of Ballardian, Thatcherite feeling. This isn’t real, of course, anymore than the posh Downton Abbey or quirky Richard Curtis visions of England are real.

Council estates, concrete, flared jeans, Northern accents and a biting cold and an endlessly overcast sky. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (1978) 138 p.ĭespite having lived here for a year, I have a subconscious stereotypical vision of England – perhaps most Australians do – as a dour and bleak and irredeemably brown place which is fundamentally linked to the 1970s and 1980s.

The cement garden summary