Ian McEwan first came to public notice in 1975; he was immediately recognized as an important and new voice on the fictional scene. Along with Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, his contemporaries, he is one of the most esteemed novelists of his generation....

Ian McEwan is very much a product of the new British universities, those popularly known as "plate-glass universities" to distinguish them from the older "red-brick universities" at which writers such as Kinglsey Amis or Philip Larkin have taught or stil...

"The patio" is a term used by estate agents to describe any collection of paving stones that is loosely attached to a house. Builders like patios because they give an illusion of order to a new house. They push all the muck they should...

THE CEMENT GARDEN Directed and written by: Andrew Birkin Starring: Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sinead Cusack Playing at: Copley Place Unrated (nudity, adult themes, incest) "The Cement Garden" is never lacking in nerve. Based on Ian McEwan's 1978...

Privacy is one of the imaginative poles of a story [The Cement Garden] whose ambiguities tease and fascinate me the more I reflect on it. McEwan's imagination moves between extremes of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, and he offers a series of charged phrases, images and atmospheres which give his story a mythic direction. Both domestic privacy and its opposite—society—are present in the young narrator's observation "I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community...

["The Cement Garden"] is really a kind of extended dream, although there's nothing dreamy about the precision and clarity of the writing. Its narrator, Jack, is a 15-year-old English boy so sunk in self-loathing that there are long stretches when he can't even be bothered to bathe or brush his teeth. Jack's father is a crabbed, oppressive man …; his mother is not much more than a shadow, and their neighborhood is a wasteland of abandoned prefabs. Life here seems smo...