It fed into a rather apocalyptic sense of things." The phones didn't work properly, the tube was a nightmare, but no one complained. "Everyone seemed focused on a sense that we were always at the end of things, that it was all collapsing. Where did it come from? "It was the late 70s," he says. The universe conjured up by The Cement Garden feels almost unimaginably distant, I say – not least for anyone acclimatised to the more genteel landscapes of McEwan's recent fiction. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Georgia Clarke-Day and George Mackay rehearsing The Cement Garden at The Vaults, Waterloo. I try to put my finger on who he reminds me of: a studiously unflashy neurologist, perhaps, like the protagonist of his 2005 novel, Saturday.
The sun streams in through the windows as he motions me to sit down. One American critic was wittier: McEwan's fiction, he wrote, paraphrasing Hobbes, was "nasty, British and short".įour decades on, coiled into the corner of a sofa in the formidably tidy lounge of his house in Bloomsbury, London, McEwan could hardly seem less macabre. The book became a cult hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and earned McEwan, as well as a new career as a novelist, an inevitable soubriquet: Ian McAbre. Freudians will be able to guess the rest.
The garden in question may have been concreted over by their father, but it's when their mother dies – and her body requires disposal – that the spare cement comes into its own. Just 138 pages long and narrated in the deceptively affectless monotone of a 14-year-old boy called Jack, The Cement Garden tells the story of how he and his three siblings retreat into their own world after the death of their parents. The rest is, if not quite history, then at least publishing legend.
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