Rating: 
Summary: Disturbing, But Not Much More
Review: This book means many things to many different people. Some people think that its incestuously beautiful, while other people are sickened by it. My reaction was neither of these. When i got done reading it, I just thought, so what?
Its a slightly unsettling story and is somewhat interesting. The incest between the brother and sister at the end of the book is not unexpected. Sure, it is slightly disturbing, but not much more than that. It wants to be the symbolic shocker that The Lord of the Flies is, but it just doesn't have the depth to carry it off.
If you're on a long plane ride, or just really bored and looking for something to read, then I recommend this book. But if you're looking for something deeply meaningful and fascinating, take a pass on this dull affair of a book.
Rating: 
Summary: first-rate nightmare
Review: This book will hanunt you: it is horrible and utterly believable, every word dripping with the meaninglessness of life and depression and confusion. THe plot is quite basic: siblings trying to keep a family together, but its descent into chaos is a chilling addition to fine literature. It is so vivid that you can smell it. TO reveal more would spoil the readers' discovery of the plot. While I prefer to stick to older classics, this one is truly worth the read. The atmostphere is so realistic and painful, so bleak, which reflects a writing style that is absolutely masterful. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.
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Summary: Mommy in the Basement
Review: This novel is filled with rotting things: snacks discarded under beds like dirty socks; ancient leftovers which ferment into a truly mean cuisine; undumped rubbish which converts an otherwise pleasant backyard into an horrifically pungent landfill.The undisposed of body of Mommy, however, is at the heart of this shocking novel, and the stench of decay which eventually reeks from her cement coffin is suffocatingly descriptive of the ripe state of mind which gradually envelops these wild youngsters. In language both simple and explosive, Ian McEwan has created a story of hallucinatory proportions. What kinds of relationships would children develop among themselves if left entirely on their own? There are moments of rather eerie adolescent tenderness in these pages which provide fresh (ah!) food for thought. These kids seem bizarre. But are they? You may or may not care to live with (or like) them, but a few hours spent in their creative company might just make for a mighty sound investment. Read them!
Rating: 
Summary: A Midsummer Nightmare: A Gothic Tale of Callaghan's Britain
Review: This short novella deals with a similar theme to that of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, namely the behaviour of children and adolescents when free of the constraints of adult behaviour. Four siblings from a working-class family - Jack, the teenaged narrator, his older sister Julie, younger sister Sue and the youngest, Tom- are orphaned by the death of their mother, their father having died about two years earlier. In order to stay together and avoid being put into the care of the local authority, they conceal their mother's death by hiding her body in a trunk, filling it with cement and leaving it in the cellar of their house. As it is the summer holidays, there is no school for them to attend, and they spend the long, hot days in idleness. Apart from Tom, who occasionally plays with boys from a nearby tower block, the youngsters avoid contact with the outside world, until Julie introduces an outsider into their home in the shape of her older boyfriend Derek. The final denouement arises as a result of the conflict between Julie's relationship with Derek and the growing incestuous feelings between her and Jack. The book was published in 1978 and, although there are no explicit period references, in many ways it reflects the mood of Britain in the late seventies. That was a time of economic recession, of industrial unrest, of unemployment, of concern about declining public services and the condition of the inner cities. (The period also saw some of the hottest summers of recent decades). The weak minority government of Prime Minister James Callaghan was widely perceived as being unable or unwilling to do anything about the country's problems. The era also saw a growing sense of youthful rebelliousness and resentment of adult authority which found its most extreme expression in the punk movement. Although a generation gap was not a new phenomenon, the mood of the young in the seventies was quite different to that of their older brothers and sisters in the sixties. Youthful rebellion in the hippy era often took the form of altruistic idealism, and even in its hedonistic forms tended to be joyous and optimistic. The rebellion of the young in the seventies, by contrast, tended to be more sour and resentful, characterised by a cynical pessimism. The setting of the book is a bleak, impoverished district of an unnamed British inner city. The children's house is one of the few remaining in an area marked out for redevelopment, and is surrounded either by soulless tower blocks or by derelict, rubble-strewn wasteland. Their garden, one of the few islands of green in the area, has been concreted over by their father (hence the title of the book). A dustmen's' strike means that refuse is not being collected. There is a pervasive atmosphere of stifling heat and noxious odours. The children- Jack in particular- are cynical, apathetic and suspicious of the adult world in all its forms. Their independent life together has few positive attractions- its main features are boredom, squalor and quarrels- but they prefer it to the alternative of submitting to adult authority. The incestuous relationship between Jack and Julie can be seen as both the ultimate expression of family solidarity and as a conscious rejection of the taboos and conventions of the adult world. A word that has been used by other reviewers about this book is "gothic". With two qualifications, that is a useful categorisation. The first qualification is that the so-called "gothic" movement in literature, a literature obsessed with death, darkness, gloom and despair, has very little connection with Gothic architecture, an architecture that celebrates life, light, colour and faith. The second qualification is that McEwan's work represents a modern development of the "gothic" tradition; he has abandoned the supernatural elements and exotic settings beloved of Georgian and Victorian gothic authors, but has retained their fascination with death, decay and the macabre and their emphasis on the darker side of human nature, including human sexuality, which can be treated with a greater freedom than was possible for earlier writers. (Besides the incest of Jack and Julie, Tom, the youngest child, who loves to dress as a girl, is presented as a budding transvestite). McEwan's prose in this work is deliberately simple- the sentences are short, with few dependent clauses, and mostly describe concrete actions with little room for speculation or analysis of thoughts and feelings. (This is not surprising, given that it is narrated by a young boy of both limited education and limited experience). Despite the terseness of the prose and the desolate urban setting, however, this is not a work of social realism. If one tries to read it as realistic fiction, a number of details do not ring true. (Would the disappearance of the children's mother, for example, really have gone unnoticed by the outside world for so long, especially as she had been receiving medical treatment for her illness and had even arranged to go into hospital?) If, however, one reads it as a work of grim fantasy, it can be seen as an accomplished and powerful piece of work. The combination of matter-of-fact narration and bleak modern setting with macabre horror and bizarre happenings gives the work an eerie, hallucinatory quality; not so much a midsummer night's dream as a midsummer nightmare.
Rating:
Summary: Tightly told, compelling story about family secrets
Review: This story is about family secrets - but it does not keep its secrets hidden for very long. In fact, within a few pages, we know more about the family that is at the heart of the story than we probably wanted to know. The entire story revolves around a group of four siblings, two boys, two girls, ages seventeen, fifteen, thirteen and six, and how they deal with the circumstances surrounding the loss of their parents. What develops is chilling and yet told in such a way that it appears natural and logical, since it is told in the first person of one of the siblings, the fifteen year old boy. Children who are not blessed with adult maturity and wisdom are left to their own devices and judgments. Outsiders are treated with suspicion and contempt. Disaster ensues. We witness a story of control, death, incest, sibling emotional suffocation, cruelty, and at times, tenderness, all told in a very unnerving way.
Like much of his later work, Ian McEwan proves adept at delving below the skin of his subjects, with complete realism and honesty. And be warned, this is not for the squeamish or moralistic. But then I am not aware of any of his writings that are. In the hands of a lesser writer, some of the subject matter could be offensive and unseemly. But McEwan is no ordinary writer.
While this story was written early in his arc as a novelist, it still stands as a worthy work. One can also see how his later works have progressed and become more literary, but any McEwan fan should enjoy it, and anyone looking for a place to begin reading his work will find much to admire here.
Rating:
Summary: Superbly paced!
Review: This was a gruesome, terrifying and disturbing novel. Following the death of their father, four children suffer the death of their mother. To stay together they can't let anyone know what has happened so they bury her in the cement in the cellar.. And then things get even more disturbing. An absolutely fantastic read, and the best Ian McEwan I've read to date.
Rating:
Summary: Confronting
Review: Though it lacks the confident mastery of his more recent work, this early McEwan novel still has the power to disturb. When the parents of four sexually precocious children die in quick succession - the mother's corpse being entombed in a concrete block in the basement in order to stop the family being splintered by the authorities - the children must learn to cope on their own. In lesser hands this could have been worked up into a straightforward monster-in-the-basement-style thriller, but with McEwan at the helm it more interestingly becomes a study in grief, repression, adolescence, and the dissolution of the family in late twentieth-century Britain.
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Summary: The Beauty and Horror of this Garden
Review: When I first started to read THE CEMENT GARDEN, I thought that it was slightly interesting but slow moving. The end of the book completely changed my opinion. Throughout the whole book I knew in the back of my mind that Julie and Jack did not share an ordinary brother/sister relationship but I did not know if McEwan would follow through on this premonition. This premonition did not prepare me for the ending.
When I first read the last chapter of the book, Julie and Jack's incest disgusted me, but upon a second reading, I saw the beauty of the situation and I could not stop reading it.
Not for the prudish or the faint of heart, but a good read all the same.
Rating:
Summary: Tap Dancing In The Cement Garden
Review: Wonderfull..disturbing..altogether amazing! Having originally seen the Televised version, I read the book and was amazed, what a wonderfull tale of a family struggling to keep their heads as they play musical chairs...6 Chairs...father dies, 5 chairs...mother...four chairs, they try to keep afloat, and manage to...until that sledgehammer hits the cement...
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