The cement garden

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cement Garden (originally The Cement Garden ) is a novel by Ian McEwan from 1978.

action

A family of six with four underage children lives in an English suburb: the teenagers Julie, Jack and Sue, and the straggler Tom. When the parents die in quick succession, the father from a heart attack, the mother from cancer, and the children left behind as orphans, they decide to keep the situation a secret, which is easy due to the family's social isolation: the parents had hardly allowed visitors anyway , The family's house is the last in a settlement that has already been largely demolished for a bypass that will never be built.

Since the mother got through her illness to the end with only pills and Julie had already taken over her household chores, nobody notices the death of the mother and her disappearance. The children fear that if the mother's death becomes known, they will be separated. So they decide to bury their dead mother in a box of cement in the cellar. Julie and Jack take over the duties of their parents, outwardly no change in the circumstances is visible.

It wasn't until Julie became friends with Derek that the situation became critical. Derek, who has access to the house, soon reveals the children's secret, but remains silent until Julie turns away from him and also sexually turns to her brother Jack. Eventually, incest occurs between the two siblings. The novel ends with Julie and Jack sleeping together while Derek smashes his mother's cement coffin and finally alerts the police.

The title of the novel refers to the father's efforts to use a lot of cement to make his garden as easy to care for as it suited himself and his wife's health; the father's plan is also the reason why the children have enough cement in the house to make the mother's body disappear.

filming

Ian McEwan's novel served as the template for the Andrew Birkin film of the same name from 1993, which starred Andrew Robertson and Charlotte Gainsbourg .

Sinéad Cusack , Hanns Zischler and Jochen Horst took on other roles .

Processing in music

The singer Madonna quotes an excerpt from the novel in the intro of the piece "What It Feels Like for a Girl" . The passage describes the argument between Julie and Jack over the youngest brother Tom's desire to dress like a girl. Julie and her sister Sue support the brother's wish, while Jack, as a pubescent teenager, forbids the youngest, Tom, to act out his transvestism or transsexuality . Julie and Sue attribute Jack's behavior to socially standardized sexism and the associated oppression of women by men. According to Julie, Jack's rejection of his brother is because of the socially enforced devaluation of female traits, such as sex. B. fashionable appearance. Jack's sisters also attribute this behavior to the fact that there is a certain suppressed desire in their big brother Jack to want to slip into the role of the woman.

criticism

After the publication of the novel, Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarism, the content of the novel is strongly reminiscent of Julian Gloag's novel Our Mother's House from 1963. The allegations were not pursued, but are cited again and again when similar in another of his books Allegations are made.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Column in The Guardian of December 3, 2006 on the then current allegation of plagiarism at Atonement , accessed November 27, 2015