![]() ![]() This is McEwan’s first novel, continuing my recent trend of inexplicably sampling new authors by reading their first and probably weakest books. But apart from the fact that it takes place over summer, The Cement Garden is certainly a grey and grimy novel, portraying macabre events on the outskirts of an unnamed town in a windswept, derelict neighbourhood where few houses remains standing. I don’t know, maybe the ’70s were just bleak everywhere. But the cover of this edition of The Cement Garden is perhaps a perfect distillation of that sort of Ballardian, Thatcherite feeling. ![]() This isn’t real, of course, anymore than the posh Downton Abbey or quirky Richard Curtis visions of England are real. ![]() Council estates, concrete, flared jeans, Northern accents and a biting cold and an endlessly overcast sky. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (1978) 138 p.ĭespite having lived here for a year, I have a subconscious stereotypical vision of England – perhaps most Australians do – as a dour and bleak and irredeemably brown place which is fundamentally linked to the 1970s and 1980s. ![]()
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