McEwan's "Cement Garden", the terrible story of four children

Cement Garden is a novella or novella published three years after the publication of his debut novel, First Love, Last Rites by the famous Contemporary British writer Ian McEwan (incidentally, the Afterword to the Chinese translation appended to the book says it was published in 1975, which seems to be a bit problematic).

Chinese translation of Cement Garden

The story adopts a first-person narrative angle, and the narrator, the protagonist, is a fourteen or fifteen-year-old teenager. The plot is not complicated, but the content is frightening, full of sexuality and injustice - in fact, it is also a common theme in the writer's work, so he got a nickname of "Horror Ian".

Perhaps it has to be said that fortunately McEwan lives in this era, literary taboos have become less and less, and whether it is moral or not is not particularly important. If you go back to the era of Flaubert and Wilde, it will undoubtedly cause an uproar, even in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Joyce's "Ulysses", d. H. Lawrence's "Madame Chatterley's Lover", Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer", etc., still caused great controversy.

From another point of view, the development of literature to today, most of the subject matter has been used by predecessors, contemporary writers can only find another way to open up other fields, which is also inevitable. Therefore, we can also see that many writers also like to be painstaking in their skills.

"Cement Garden" is divided into two parts, telling the terrible story of a family of four children (two boys and two girls), mainly describing their daily life at home after the death of their parents, with absurd colors in the realistic attention to detail. In particular, they used cement to seal their mother's body in a cabinet. The two oldest siblings finally bonded after many interruptions, but the police car followed.

In an interview with the Paris Review magazine in 2002, when asked "where did the idea for Cement Garden come from," McEwan replied that it was 1976, when he was "thinking about writing about children trying to survive without adults." Of course, he knows that "this is the usual setting of many children's stories" and "the essence of Lord of the Flies." And what makes him unique is that he treats the story as an urban version. (See Paris Review Writers Interview 2)

As we all know, Golding's "Lord of the Flies" tells the story of how a group of children kill each other on an isolated island, expressing the theme of the inherent evil of human nature. In contrast, "The Cement Garden" does not show much evil (in fact, there is no evil, more of an ethical sin).

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