Introduction to Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (1978)

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan was first published in 1978, setting the lives of four brothers and sisters from six to seventeen, who have lost both of their parents in quite a brief amount of time. Once the mother has died, the abandoned children decide to bury her in the cement, which was initially bought by the father to cover the garden.

One could focus on the narrative voice in the novel, that is to say the voice of the narrator, literally the one who relates the story to us. Here in The Cement Garden, the role of the narrator is held by one of the children, Jack, who says being fourteen at the very beginning of the book. So, it is a first-person narrative, with an 'I-narrator'.

According to Gérard Genette's work on narratology (in Figures III), every narrative is built on a specific point of view, and the narrator's status can be defined first by its narrative level (which makes it extra- or intradiegetic) and second by its relationship to the narrative itself (which makes it hetero- or homodiegetic). At first sight, Jack is an intradiegetic and homodiegetic narrator.

McEwan, known as a master of the « short, sharp, shock », provides to his writing the brute simplicity of a child voice and the conciseness of every day life language within extraordinary circumstances, and perhaps these unlikely marriages make the specificity of The Cement Garden.

Being the narrator and a character who evolves within the narrative, we are told the story through the point of view and judgement of a fourteen-year-old boy.

Given the fact that the narrative sets a disturbing oddness combined to a keen sense of commonness, one could analyse to what extent the narrative voice echoes the narrative itself, in other word, stealing Umberto Eco's words, how the narrative voice builds a « significant framework », so that the narration keeps the lid on the narrative; first studying the temporality of the narration, then its tone and eventually the collide between narration and narrative.

[Genette, Gérard (1972)."Discours du récit", in Figures III, Paris, Seuil, pp. 65-278]