Tatiana's Reviews > The Cement Garden

Will it reflect badly on me if I say this book isn't sordid enough to be entertaining or truly affecting? Considering how unsettling and uncomfortable it already is?

Four siblings, ranging from 6 to 17, who have too close for comfort of a relationship (if the word "incest" flashed in you mind, you are correct - it is not a spoiler, the "action" starts on page 2), witness both their parents die within the weeks of each other. When their mother dies, they make a decision to bury her in the cellar and to not tell anyone, to keep their family intact. Left to their own devices, these children go through the motions of playing house and, you guessed it, they don't do it very well.

The Cement Garden gives a predictably disturbing and occasionally icky picture of what can happen to kids isolated from the community and unsupervised by adults. As much as I hate reading about incest, especially when it is written as some romantic device or for melodramatic effect, here it is strangely understandable, albeit not less gross.

However, the novel didn't quite work for me. I thought there was more to say about the family, the kids' parents, their path to such a taboo closeness. The point the author was trying to make with this story evaded me. I just didn't quite get it or even if I did, the novel failed to affect me as much as Atonement and On Chesil Beach did in the past. It happens rather often when I read McEwan though.