For all that I respect auctorial control of a story's material, I recognize that control can be squeezed too severely, until tonal and stylistic restraint can seem a lack of conviction.
This trap engulfs THE CEMENT GARDEN, which, in outline, implies a macabre tale of psychological collapse, but which becomes, from one page to the next, a polite refusal to stare at the emotional scars of its concept.
What he have, here, is the story of children suddenly confronted by the death of parents. McEwan keeps the emotional impact of loss at arm's length:
When Sue came in and Julie told her the news, both girls burst into tears and embraced each other. [...] I watched my sisters crying; I sensed it would seem hostile to look elsewhere. I felt excluded but I did not wish to appear so. At one point I placed my hand on Sue's shoulder, the way Julie had on mine, but neither of them noticed me, any more than wrestlers in a clinch would, so I removed it. Through their crying Julie and Sue were saying unintelligible things, to themselves perhaps or to each other. I wished I could abandon myself like them, but I felt watched. I wanted to go and look at myself in the mirror.
This detachment continues even after the children decide to keep the deaths a secret.
"You mean," I said to Julie, "that we shouldn't tell anybody."
Julie walked off toward the house without replying. I watched her go into the kitchen and splash her face at the sink. She held her head under the cold water tap till her hair was soaked; then she wrung it out and swept it clear of her face. As she walked back toward us, drops of water ran onto her shoulders. She sat down on the rockery and said, "If we don't tell anybody we've got to do something ourselves quickly." Sue was close to tears.
"But what can we do?" she moaned.
Julie was playing it up a bit. She said very quietly, "Bury her, of course." For all her terseness, her voice still shook.
"Yes," I said, thrilling with horror, "we can have a private funeral, Sue." My younger sister was now weeping steadily, and Julie had her arm round her shoulder. She looked at me coldly over Sue's head. I was suddenly irritated with them both. I got up and walked round to the front of the house to see what Tom was up to.
He was sitting with another boy in the pile of yellow sand by the front gate. They were digging a complicated system of fist-sized tunnels.
"He says," said Tom's friend derisively, squinting up at me, "he says, he says his mum's just died and it's not true."
"It is true," I told him. "She's my mum too, and she's just died."
"Ner-ner, told ya, ner-ner," Tom sneered and plunged his wrists deep into the sand.
His friend thought for a moment. "Well, my mum's not dead."
"Don't care," said Tom, working away at his tunnel.
"My mum's not dead," the boy repeated to me.
"So what?" I said.
"Because she isn't," the boy yelled. "She isn't." I composed my face and knelt down by them in the sand. I placed my hand sympathetically on the shoulder of Tom's friend.
"I'll tell you something," I said quietly, "I've just come from your house. Your dad told me. Your mum's dead. She came out looking for you and a car run her over."
"Ner-ner, your mum's dead," Tom crowed.
"She isn't," the boy said to himself.
"I'm telling you," I hissed at him, "I've just come from your house. Your dad's pretty upset, and he's really angry with you. Your mum got run over because she was looking for you." The boy stood up. The color had drained from his face. "I wouldn't go home if I was you," I continued, "your dad'll be after you." The boy ran off, up our garden path to the front door. Then he remembered, turned round and ran back. As he passed us he was beginning to blubber.
"Where you going?" Tom shouted after him, but his friend shook his head and kept on running.
From beginning to end, McEwan retains a calm, frozen tone. As I read this book, I hoped to find startling metaphors, unexpected turns of phrase, anything that might shatter the mild facade of this detached narrative, but nothing emerged to unsettle me. The story's events are potentially disturbing, but what I felt, instead, was a writer's unwillingess to acknowledge, to confront, the horrors that he watches through the wrong end of a telescope.
THE CEMENT GARDEN represents a blandly middle-class approach to horror. I would have welcomed some aristocratic intensity or poetry of style, some working-class emotional engagement. I would have welcomed a sense of personal risk, both for the characters and for the writer. What I received, instead, was lukewarm competence -- a competence undeniably consistent, but all-too gentle.
You could argue that my perspective, here, is invalid, because THE CEMENT GARDEN was neither "marketed" nor labelled as horror, and I could see your point.
But the story and its details presented in this book are clearly meant to be horrific, clearly meant to evoke a visceral response, in much the same way that details in THE TIN DRUM, by Günter Grass, or in the war stories of Isaac Babel, are meant to hit the reader hard. The difference is that Grass and Babel seem imaginatively and emotionally engaged with these details in ways that McEwan is not. McEwan seems to stand back as far away as he can from his own story and its disturbing implications.
This, in my view, represents a lost opportunity.
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