Word: mcewan
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Singer ∙ The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan...
Although he uses conventional methods, McEwan produces something well beyond the run of the chill. He meticulously establishes the plausibility of his unlikely tale. The isolation of the house and its inhabitants is crucial: things could not go wrong the way they do in the presence of prying neighbors. Also necessary is a large quantity of cement, an empty trunk in the basement and, later, a sledgehammer. Most important is the question of motivation. Faced with the fact of their mother's corpse and the fear of being dispersed as orphans by the authorities, the children...
...CEMENT GARDEN by Ian McEwan...
Dank dungeons, gothic ruins and rainswept mountain peaks are fine for inducing the creeps. But when it comes to high-grade macabre, there's no place like home. Take the London house furnished by British Author Ian McEwan, 29, in this tight, unsettling first novel. The place stands almost deserted amid urban rubble, one of the few survivors of a highway plan that went nowhere. In it live Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom, a reasonably normal array of siblings ranging in age from 17 to six, and their mother, who is dying. The earlier death of the father...
...youth does not dwell on this point, and McEwan never links Jack's pathology to society at large. Preachiness and moralizing would only direct attention away from the immediacy that is the novel's strongest suit. Seen from the inside, the characters are simply beleaguered children trying to cope and, ultimately, failing. Outsiders find their degeneration criminal; the book shows the inadequacy of such a judgment. Aberrant acts fascinate because of their strangeness, and those who perform them are rarely able to make their reasons clear. The Cement Garden suggests that the most terrifying thing about such behavior...