Rating: 
Summary: remarkably dull
Review: I wanted to like this book. McEwan's writing in the beginning (before the storyline heads toward nightmare/fantasy territory) is really quite good. But as the storyline becomes more deranged, the book actually becomes less readable. For a book about death, incest, and decay, it's remarkably uninteresting! I mean, with material like that, the author really has to WORK to turn the audience off.
The chief problem, I think, is the character development. Most of the characters are flat sketches. Sue is the only one who has a chance at seeming like a human being, but she's relegated to a minor role. Most disturbingly, Julie is written as the worst kind of adolescent boy fantasy: she never seems more than a tantalizing seductress putting on a show for her brother. I'm not sure whether McEwan is trying to make some point with this, but with the main female character as a pure erotic object for her brother's vicarious pleasure, I wondered whether this book is even intended to be read by women (or men, for that matter, who aren't in a state of arrested development.)
As the storyline is quite dull, the book might have been saved by good descriptive writing, but it doesn't really possess that either. McEwan's minimalism doesn't allow for the thick atmosphere of depravity the book commands. As a parable, the book doesn't work either, for there's no moral center, no conclusion to be drawn from the events. In the end, I think, it's just a slight book.
Rating: 
Summary: Got me all weird...
Review: I wanted to read this book since a long long time and I happened to pick it up at a sale just about now, so I decided why not, since it was anyway a slim book.
What I did not realise was the impact this slim book would likely have on me and wow i still cannot believe this book. The central theme of this book is how four young orphans are freed from the daily living and enter or rather create a world of their own where everything is bizarre and not quie there at all.
Julie - being the oldest is quite bossy and soon experiencing the pangs of growing up, her sexuality and the newly found role of not only a surrogate parent but also the knowing of what is to be done and how.
Jack - the aloof and almost demented teenager who is silent and yet so aware of what happens...I thought this character to be the strangest and yet somewhere down the line very sane.
Sue - the recluse who is shut all day reading and writing in her diary...and finally Tom - the baby or the youngets amongst the four who needs all the attention in the world...
This book is totally mindblowing and makes you think a lot. A lot than you can imagine...I have not given any spoiler..read it to believe it...
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating perspective on an "abnormal" situation
Review: I was sucked into the narrators world. WOW! This book shocked me and made me look at family life in a whole new way! I love the way the characters and imagary used. Once I picked up the book, I could not put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: What is "Normal?" What is "Natural"?
Review: Ian McEwan freezes our attention on the grotesque, then renders grotesquerie plausible, even "normal." Indeed, what is "natural" assumes an expanded range of possibility in McEwan's writing, adding fresh dimension to psychological horror. The Cement Garden, his first novel (and better described as a novella), brings these observations graphically to life, in precise, crystalline prose.
The Cement Garden has been likened to Golding's Lord of the Flies for its careful evocation of a society of young people, suddenly relieved of adult oversight, that evolves rapidly, opportunistically, organically in response to specific challenges posed by an unusual environment. In McEwan's working of these materials, related in the flat, dispassionate voice of Jack, the 14-year-old narrator, the challenging environment is the solitary house in which Jack, his brother, and two sisters live, set in the midst of a desolate urban landscape cleared for a freeway that never gets built.
The book takes its name from the paved-over garden Jack's fussy, acerbic father, a heart patient, envisions as tidier as easier to maintain. The exertions of the project kill the father, to no one's apparent regret, in the first chapter, leaving a sizable inventory of cement behind. With the demise of their long ailing mother shortly thereafter, the orphaned children are forced to recreate the family unit. Fearful of the split-up of the family, foster care for little Tom, and other worrisome ministrations of an impersonal state, the children decide to tell no one of their mother's death and to entomb her in concrete in the basement.
Jack recounts these and other details, and the changes each child undergoes, in his matter-of-fact voice. McEwan charges his tale with an extraordinary measure of sexual tension, primarily between Jack - much more than the stereotypically acne-covered, pubescent, serially self-abusing "sullen teen" - and his beautiful, athletic older sister Julia, who assumes the maternal role of "Wendy" to the family's "lost children." The movement of the story is aided and abetted by Derek, Julia's "bloke," a professional snooker player, aking all the questions the nosey private eye in a Hitchcock picture usually asks. The dreaded resolution of the relentlessly rising tension, carefully withheld until the closing pages, relieves narrative pressure but raises disturbing perspectives on love, the family, the "ties that bind."
The Cement Garden renews, at least in my mind, the great question of what it is that prompts a lavishly gifted writer to explore so sensitively the wholly bizarre. Great writing generally works simultaneously at several levels and admits layers of meaning. McEwan writes about familiar characters who before our eyes become something very, very different. He begs us to inquire beneath the surface familiarity into worlds unseen by, or denied to, passing spectators. He compels us to ask ourselves "what is `normal'?" "What is `natural'?" His answers may unsettle, but they are are the product of a novelistic logic that, in its internal workings, is eminently reasonable.
The Cement Garden is assuredly not for every taste. More than once, I looked up from the page with an "ugh." McEwan's imagination teems with clambering spiders. But as an early example of McEwan's art and his project to redefine, or reinvent, the psychological horror story, this book is a worthy, if unsettling, read.
Rating:
Summary: A Small Masterpiece
Review: Ian McEwan's prose debut changed the scene of British prose and redefined a genre. Typically, horror conjures up gothic gloom, viscera and American teenagers. McEwan replaces all this with clarity, and takes us on a unique journey in this book. The size of this book (Under 140 pages) means you could finish this in an afternoon, and it is divided perfectly. The prose is as neat and clear as the cubes of colour in a child's paintbox.
The area around the narrator's family is an urban waste land, demolished for an unbuilt motorway. The Father dies in chapter one, the Mother by the end of part 1. The isolation is complete, and McEwan's experiment truly begins. The children do not get help. They do not call the police. They take care of matters as best as they can, binding them closer. From then on, we view each in their own ways - the youngest child regresses mentally to a baby, and is cared for by the heroine of the novel Julie. As always with McEwan, the women are the most resilient customers. She effortlessly assumes the role of Mother. Jack is every teenage male - ruthless if he had the courage, spotty, obsessed with more red-handed pursuits. Julie out-does him hands down in taking care of the family, suntanning and getting a boyfriend. What does Jack have to offer? Only his physical strength, until the end when the two finally comfort each other in a beautifully written passage. This is where McEwan's unique idiom makes its power felt.
Immoral? McEwan is 'only' going for shock effects? Neither. It can be argued that the children have coped better in their own way with orphanhood than our culture permits. In earlier centuries, all the features of coping with bereavement are played out in this economically expressed modern-day fable - sibling incest, infantilism - and the comparison to the social services' impending arrival (Summoned by a poignantly smug and shallow character)seems stark - no bureaucrat could give Jack Julie's sisterly tenderness. Of course I don't condone the act of incest, but crucially recognise that in order for our objections to be formed, the moral ground of precisely what is 'natural' and 'functional' in the first place has to be compared critically. I think The Cement Garden, if only briefly, will have you doing precisely this, and won acclaim on its first publication by both John Irving and Raymond Carver.
This is McEwan's way of getting inside your head. This is where we find McEwan's near-gravitational attraction in contemporary literature.
Rating:
Summary: Beauty in The Cement Garden
Review: Ian McEwan's story was at first read a scary & disturbing story of bizarre behavior, by four siblings that are suddenly orphaned and struggle to maintain the life that has been shattered. In this light the story appeared to me stilted and flat, with every character unpleasant and warped.BUT, in retrospect I now see The Cement Garden in a new light. One that brings beauty to the story and makes each character very lovable. This is a book with only one character - Jack - with a very different story to tell - the difficulty a boy experiences as he watches himself struggle through adolescence. Each character becomes a component of this experience: Dad & Mom's death represent the difficult (and ineffective) way a boy detatches himself from his parents. Older sister Julie becomes his (at first) strange & silent future that he slowly begins to understand & adjust to. And which ultimately seduces him - but only after he strips himself bare and confronts his fears & self-doubts. Younger brother Tom represents those irrational fears & self-doubts. Younger sister Sue his rational thoughts & feelings; thrilling for the future & mourning the past. Derek is his image of what he will become. From this perspective Mr. McEwan's story becomes a touching story of the delicate and difficult experience of a boy becoming a young man. Brilliantly constructed and fully developed and described. Each strange character now becomes a whole and very real picture of this challenge each young man must endure.
Rating:
Summary: Children on Their Own
Review: Imagine a cluster of four children, feeling guilty, vulnerable, and liberated by the death of their parents, living unsupervised in an isolated house. So, what do you think would happen? Not, I bet, what Ian McEwan cooks up in "The Cement Garden", which shows the life of these poor children gradually evolving into a weird nightmare of innocence and incest. This is definitely a good read and a brilliant narrative. And, it's not to be missed by those Amazon.com readers who feel "The Lord of the Flies" was wimpy and pulled its punches.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing tale of a teenager's coming-of-age.
Review: In this discomforting 1978 novel, Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan shows all the promise that makes his later, more fully developed novels so compelling--the same intensity, the same psychologically intriguing characters, the same haunting darkness, and the same exploration of sexuality. In the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere of an old house, one of the few left standing in a London urban renewal area strewn with rubble, a family of four children, ranging in age from six to seventeen, try to survive on their own after the death of their father, first, and then, their mother. Because the three younger children will have to go into "care" if their mother's death is known, they dispose of her body themselves in the basement of their decaying house and carry on as if their parents are still alive. Seventeen-year-old Julie is ostensibly the adult in charge, though fifteen-year-old Jack has promised his dying mother that he will share the responsibilities. Jack, who narrates the story, is filled with all the sexual angst of an isolated young boy, never part of the mainstream, trying to figure out who he is, at the same time that he has been thrust into an adult role that he cannot fulfill. During the hottest summer on record, a new complication arises with the appearance of Julie's boyfriend, Derek, a man in his twenties, who upsets the fragile equilibrium of the family by investigating their secrets and seeking out the source of the sweetish smell emanating from the basement. All the emotional and sexual tensions which McEwan has nurtured throughout the novel peak in a conclusion that is both repulsive and utterly compelling. This novel is not for the faint of heart, sometimes so revolting and disturbing in its psychological details, all vividly rendered, that the reader may question whether to continue reading. Ultimately, however, McEwan's concise and polished style, his ability to choose exactly the right word, and his sense of pacing kept this reader going, even as the family dynamics degenerated into a psychotic twilight zone. The sense that each character is alone and that life is dark and unlikely to change for the better is a despairing commentary on life, a bleak and chilling reminder that no one can ever control fate. Eerie, provocative, and suspenseful, McEwan uses all his talents here to create a novel of small scope and scale. In later novels, thankfully, he applies these same talents to a broader canvas, leading to richer, more subtle, and better developed fiction. Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: We are family-
Review: Incest is the latest trendy topic- be it in book, movie, fiction, memoir- and it would be easy to brush it off as mere titillation. At first, "The Cement Garden" seems to be the epitome of this sort of gratuitously shocking genre, as it painstakingly gets inside the head of a young man and his secret desires. Upon closer examination, "The Cement Garden" reveals itself to be a far more ominous book. His desire for his sister becomes indicative of his need to grab an anchor in a world that has left him behind. As these four children struggle to make a family, the sexual energy that emerges becomes a better form of family love than that which they've known before. Though the children are English, they are the British equivalent of the kind of people we so quickly and easily make fun of- the natural target of a certain type of elitist humor. Rather than mocking these children for their transgression, the book's success comes when we ultimately understand the ways and the whys of why they do what they do. Therein lies the power, and the horror of the bleak landscape of the novel- it's the only love they'll maybe ever know. Having said that the book is an artistic achievement, I also want to add that when I finished it I couldn't be sure that I was glad I took that particular journey. I was utterly enthralled with the story and its raw honesty, but so depressed when it was over, as the world of the book was so hermetic and insular that there was no way out- necessary to the book but brutal on the reader. As an aside, the film adaptation is highly worth checking out as a most faithful visual translation, mostly as a result of the bizarrely appropriate casting. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of French pop star Serge Gainsbourg and Chelsea girl Jane Birkin. (Serge and Charlotte appeared in bed together in a print ad in the early 80s.) Furthermore, the film is directed by Jane's brother and hence Charlotte's uncle Andrew Birkin, and the younger children are played by the director's own children- Charlotte's cousins.
Rating:
Summary: We are family-
Review: Incest is the latest trendy topic- be it in book, movie, fiction, memoir- and it would be easy to brush it off as mere titillation. At first, "The Cement Garden" seems to be the epitome of this sort of gratuitously shocking genre, as it painstakingly gets inside the head of a young man and his secret desires. Upon closer examination, "The Cement Garden" reveals itself to be a far more ominous book. His desire for his sister becomes indicative of his need to grab an anchor in a world that has left him behind. As these four children struggle to make a family, the sexual energy that emerges becomes a better form of family love than that which they've known before. Though the children are English, they are the British equivalent of the kind of people we so quickly and easily make fun of- the natural target of a certain type of elitist humor. Rather than mocking these children for their transgression, the book's success comes when we ultimately understand the ways and the whys of why they do what they do. Therein lies the power, and the horror of the bleak landscape of the novel- it's the only love they'll maybe ever know. Having said that the book is an artistic achievement, I also want to add that when I finished it I couldn't be sure that I was glad I took that particular journey. I was utterly enthralled with the story and its raw honesty, but so depressed when it was over, as the world of the book was so hermetic and insular that there was no way out- necessary to the book but brutal on the reader. As an aside, the film adaptation is highly worth checking out as a most faithful visual translation, mostly as a result of the bizarrely appropriate casting. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of French pop star Serge Gainsbourg and Chelsea girl Jane Birkin. (Serge and Charlotte appeared in bed together in a print ad in the early 80s.) Furthermore, the film is directed by Jane's brother and hence Charlotte's uncle Andrew Birkin, and the younger children are played by the director's own children- Charlotte's cousins.
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