McEwan, Ian 1948–: Critical Essay by Tom Paulin

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 of work." They are present again in his father's wish to build "a high wall round his special world" in order to shield his garden from an urban landscape of demolished houses and "vacant sites … lush with weeds and their flowers." Some of the images have an extraordinary power: the derelict cement garden, the gardens of the abandoned prefabs, the fine black dust that blows "from the direction of the tower blocks", and the shovel lying in the centre of a round stain of dried cement "like the hour hand of a big broken clock." Jack thinks of all the "rooms that would one day collapse" and his description of this gutted prefab makes it resemble one of the "desolate places" in Job…. Obsessively, McEwan returns to images of dereliction, arbitrary living-spaces, family and the absence of family, guilt and its absence. In these burnt-out places there is no order—nature is dead, the city is dead, and the world is drained of meaning. What his fiction designs, I think, is a fable of a dead public world and an intensely private reality…. Using imagery drawn from the great waste places of the inner city he shows how the life of the emotions is like a weed flowering in a social desert.

In The Cement Garden we see a wish for an introverted independence cutting against a wish for dependence, a desire to live in a world without parents crossing a dream of a saving love. It's as though McEwan's imagination moves between images of public sterility and private sterility. He explores various tensions and strategies of meaning without offering a definite resolution…. (pp. 49-50)

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