A female role model Madonna would love

The Cement Garden
By Ian McEwan
Vantage Classics, 138 pages
Available at Powerbooks

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, and wear shirts and boots, because it’s okay to be a boy. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly, you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldnít you? What it feels like for a girl... – Spoken intro to Madonna’s song, What It Feels Like For A Girl

The above lines are spoken by Charlotte Gainsbourg in the film version of Ian McEwan’s 1978 novel, The Cement Garden. It had been driving me crazy, trying to figure out where the passage came from. Then I looked at Madonna’s liner notes, and there it was. Typical of Madonna, really, to go for the sexual power play. (Nice video, though.) McEwan’s early novel itself is a psychosexual panorama of gender-crossing and Oedipal backsliding. It’s also one of the quickest reads I ever picked up, racing through its pages during a flight from New York to Manila.

The story of The Cement Garden sounds like a fractured fairy tale, minus the Big Bad Wolf and Evil Stepmother. Once upon a time, two brothers and two sisters lived in a simple English home with a typical garden in the backyard. The father was an oppressive, humorless sort who smoked a pipe; the mother was quiet and frail. Father, having suffered a heart attack and creeping up in years, decides to cover the whole garden over with a layer of cement; easier to maintain, he figures.

Unfortunately, he drops dead while mixing the cement, just as 14-year-old Jack (the narrator) is busy elsewhere having his first self-inflicted orgasm.

Right away, we know this isn’t the Brothers Grimm or Mother Goose. In fact, The Cement Garden reads like a two-hour Freudian dream, complete with Victorian motifs and myriad sexual entrapments. Like a dream, the narration resonates with a numbed helplessness, almost an inevitability. Yet the writing is sharp and lucid:

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared with what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright-red blanket and carried him away. He was an irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

The cement, of course, plays a key role in the bizarre events that follow. The mother, frail and bed-ridden, passes away, and the children decide the best place for her is... well, you can possibly guess. Suddenly free of an oppressive adult world, the children embark on games of role reversal and begin to set up house. While Jack, a young lad with a wry sense of humor, narrates The Cement Garden, the central power is held by Julie, the older sister who organizes the household once both parents are gone.

Julie is bewitching and beguiling, a sister who radiates sexuality, yet knows exactly its limits and powerful uses. The female power play must have been what appealed to Madonna (at least in the film version, quoted above). Julie investigates the budding sexuality of her younger siblings (early in the book, Julie and Jack play "doctor" with their younger sister lying between them on a bed). She makes 10-year-old brother Tom question his place in the new family: he at first starts wearing little girl’s clothes, then switches to baby outfits.

Jack, meanwhile, is bewildered by how easily his normal life has slipped away, once all the rules are changed. He stops going to school, then stops bathing completely. He spends most of his time reading pulp science fiction novels in the garden, or engaged in onanistic activities. Julie and Jack, bound by a secret, share an unspoken connection. But when Jack notices Julie is suddenly flush with cash and new outfits, he wonders why. He soon gets his answer: Derek, a suitor and snooker player in his 20s, enters the scene, and it’s this "normal" outsider who begins to upset the bizarre new order.

One of the most unsettling – and sometimes dryly comic – British novels I’ve encountered, The Cement Garden fits in well with McEwan’s continuing explorations of human sexuality. Over the course of 138 pages, Julie transforms from a typical sulky teen-aged girl into a kind of icon of the unconscious. She calls the shots, makes and changes her own rules, and thumbs her nose at conventional sexuality and behavior. A female role model Madonna would love.

But McEwan is not really advocating the collapse of the family, or the flourishing of perverse sexuality. Perhaps he is merely pointing out that such things do lie there, right below the surface of "civilized" society. There are traces of David Lynch in this tale of childhood perversion that flowers into something even more dark and disturbing; if Alfred Hitchcock had undergone full Freudian analysis, the results might have been something like The Cement Garden.