Mc Ewan, Ian - "The Cement Garden"

Mc Ewan, Ian - "The Cement Garden"

"The Cement Garden" is a novel written by the British author Ian Mc Ewan. The book was published in 1978.
The novel tackles the theme of adolescence abandoning the respectable and hypocritical schemes and bringing out situations often hidden and repressed for a sense of shame or fear.
What happens to the brothers Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom after the loss of both parents is exemplary of how a family unit, left without guidance, can close dangerously in itself, letting every phobia, every psychosis take over the normal development of the physical and the mind.
Burying a deceased mother in a case sealed with cement is the solution that children find easier to avoid being separated and entrusted to the authorities responsible for the care of minors. However, managing freedom is not as easy as it may seem. McEwan's narration thus becomes more and more raw. He underlines the squalor and the degradation in which the house and the dirt that reigns in the kitchen, which act as a counterpart to an external reality of a degraded and almost abandoned neighborhood, a mirror periphery of the soul of those who remained there. "The other houses had been demolished to make way for a highway that had never been built. [......] Our house was big and old. They had built it so that it looked a bit like a castle, with thick walls, squat windows and scallops above the entrance door. "A gothic novel description, which suggests Edward Hopper's painting" House by the railroad "of 1925 from which Alfred Hitchcock drew inspiration for his "Psycho".