Horror stories don’t always take place in spooky mansions or dark forests. They can also take place in normal, middle-class houses with normal, everyday people. In fact, the combination of horror and ordinariness can actually make a story even darker than those about monsters or ghosts. In other words, the fact that we can relate to the story because of how close it is to our own lives makes the horrifying events in the plot seem that much more disturbing.
This is one of the reasons why The Cement Garden has captured the imagination of readers like few other novellas of the last fifty years. Over the course of 138 pages, it takes readers on a journey of death, horror, and incest. It was written by Ian McEwan (who also wrote Atonement and On Chesil Beach) and published in 1978, and has always been considered one of the most controversial novels about childhood ever written. It tells the story of four siblings who try to survive on their own after both their parents die.
Still from The Cement Garden (1993)
Julie, Jack, Sue, and Tom lead very ordinary lives with their parents in a sleepy English neighborhood until one day their father dies from a heart attack while laying some cement in their garden. Soon after, their mother falls ill and asks Julie, the eldest daughter, to take care of her siblings and run the household. Julie does her best to keep everything under control, but she can’t do anything about her mother’s health, so some time later, she dies as well.
This is how the four children end up alone. The older ones realize that if their neighbors find out that their mother has died, they will notify Social Services and each will be sent to a different home. So they come up with a plan to hide their mother’s body: they will take the cement left from their father’s project, and bury their mother by encasing her in it and hiding her in the basement.
Can a story get any more horrifying than this? In the hands of a great writer like McEwan, yes. His narrator, Jack, tells us how the siblings try to go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. We see how they can’t manage to run the household as their parents had done before, and how the isolation in which they live starts affecting them psychologically. Julie and Jack are particularly disturbed by the reality of their new situation, leaving behind their roles as big sister and big brother, in order to take on the roles of parents to their younger siblings. This, of course, is a recipe for disaster. The relationship between the older siblings gradually turns into a very intense, incestuous relationship that stays with readers long after they finish the book.
Incest is, of course, one of the most taboo topics not only in literature but also in society. It literally goes against nature, and it makes even the most seasoned horror movie buff cringe. However, McEwan’s writing makes this novel much more than “a novel about incest.” The Cement Garden is a story about childhood, innocence, death, and all the dark things that make us human.
