The Cement Garden

I've read quite a bit of Ian McEwan so far and it has been with mixed feelings.
Atonement is ranked among my favourite novels, while Enduring Love and Solar can't make me happy.

The Cement Garden ranks somewhat in the middle.
Knowing that Ian can write novels that hit me right in thee gut, both positive and negative, I was hesitant of trying this novel.
In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have, because the novel had zero impact on me.

What's it all about, you ask?

Simply said, it's about a disfunctional family ruled by a agonizing father who has a weird sense of educating his family, a mother who demands far too much from her children when she becomes ill and lastly four children who are uncomfortably close.
The father dies first, you get to know that story right from the beginning. Together with that you instantly feel that his death doesn't mean that much to the family.
Then the mother dies and for some obscure reason the children decide to keep her body hidden and try to make a home for themselves.

You might think this leads to a heroin older sister that sacrifices her own future to bring up her siblings.
Wrong!
It's as dysfunctional as it can get.
Julie, the eldest, being 17, is trying to be the parent, but somehow it ends up with the youngest, Tom (6 years) returning to infant behaviour and dressing up as a girl.
Jack, the other brother (14 years) has an unhealthy interest in his older sister. This is shared early on when he describes playing doctor with his two sisters, Julie and Sue, examining Sue in a very sexual manner.
Sue is even the more normal of the four. Keeping to herself most of the time, but in the end even she shares in the madness.

Interesting, you think? Disgusting, maybe.
Well, let me put your doubts to rest.
It's utterly uninteresting.
You'd think that a topic as taboo as incent, can pack a punch, but all it's force goes slack in the narration of the oldest boy, Jack.
I'm glad it's only about a hundred pages long, I couldn't take much more.
It ended even as I thought it would end.
Despairingly needing content.
The topic might be heartbreaking or disgusting, when you apply it to empty characters in an empty story, you get nothing. Just an deflated sense of unease.

I'm happy I've finished it.
Ian, was Atonement really the only one I would've liked?

Review of Enduring Love

Author: Ian McEwan
First published in 1997
Thickness: 247 pages (Vintage edition)
Personal rating: 2 stars

Enduring Love is about a man with a frantic obsession for our protagonist, after both witnessing a terrible accident.
While on a picnic in the Oxford country with his wife/girlfriend/significant other, Joe Rose watches a balloon, the kind people use to enjoy the countryside from above, in trouble. Due to strong winds and a miscalculations of the 'driver' the balloon ends up floating towards power lines with just a little boy in the basket.
But not before Joe and a few other bystanders try to keep the balloon grounded. This fails and they have to let go, which all of them but one do. The one who keep hanging on, is being jerked upwards only holding a rope and comes to a lethal fall a little later.

The others of the so-called rescue team watch him fall and try to make sense of it all, most of all try to put the biggest blame of themselves, trying to see it as an act of God, not something they had in control themselves.

During this turmoil, one of the other bystanders, Jed Parry, that helped in trying to save the boy, develops an unhealthy obsession with Joe. He believes that Joe led him on and is now terrorising him, wanting so much and giving so little.
Jeds obsession leads to devastating results, while Joe himself faces the ridicule and disbelief of his immediate surroundings.
In the aftermath of a terrible accident, Joe has been led to a path where he could lose it all by the means of one disillusioned man who believes he needs to show Joe what love is and show him the path to eternal salvation.


Ian McEwan has been letting me down lately.
I've read Atonement which is simply extraordinary and gave him a place amongst my favourite authors. Not having read anything else of his, I was positive this has to be a guideline for his other works of fiction and not a one time lucky fluke.
Now, I'm not so sure anymore. Early this year I tried to read Solar which I abandoned early, and while I finished this novel, I wasn't blown away by it. All the time I thought there would be an incredible twist, but it followed the most cliché path it could've taken.
And while I'm trying to find the emotional state of Joe or Jed, all I seem to waddle through is a lot of egocentric rambling that seems to have as only reason to show the characters intelligence, by which I translate it to be the author's intelligence.
Now, having had a try at the mighty pen myself, I do not judge how a author does his magic, but in this case it was a bit much. Too many side subjects that didn't help the story, it just distracted me too much and I kept thinking a work of non-fiction would be an option for Ian McEwan to have a vent for his all-over-the-place intelligence. It seemed out of place here.
I believe, but I might be wrong, that when someone is faced with something terrible, perhaps even life-threatening, he isn't thinking of Keats or some references to biology or science, even being highly educated. In the end, the survival instincts of people are pretty much the same, whether they work at a car factory or give lectures on quantum physics.

Only two stars because I expected better, but I'm giving him one more chance to claim fame, before he is being bumped from my favourite author list.

Solar

By Ian McEwan

To read the summary the inner book flap and Goodreads provide, click on the following link: Goodreads' take on Solar

My own personal opinion is rather bad. I give it a 1 out of 10, meh... bad with other words. 

I have a rule I apply very rarely, which is that I give a novel about 50 pages and then decide if it's worth reading further at all.
With most novels I don't even make that choice, I just keep on reading and get to the end, mostly too soon.

With Solar, I had to struggle to make the quota of 50 pages, and actually abandoned the whole thing while still in its forties.

It's bad, it's truly bad. I've read Atonement and that is a marvellous little piece of literature. I had watched the movie first, which made me wonder about the book and I'm still very much relieved I decided to give it a go, because I rarely read adapted books if I've seen the movie already.
(I used to be different, but it's not so much fun if you know all the key elements - the other way around isn't swell either, so at this time it's either the book or the movie, not both)

I'm born in a dutch speaking country, Belgium to be precise, and have not been fed on English. The education system and my want for good novels, preferably in the language they're written in, have made my English quite good, if you don't mind me saying so. I might write the occasional spelling mistake, or add a syllable to many to some words, but over all I'm content with my knowledge of the beautiful language.

But I do find it annoying if I have to look the meaning of some words too much, especially when you can substitute them with easier ones. I'm not saying 'food' should become 'grub', or 'eloquent' should become 'coherently spoken'.
But reading the first page you come across words as unprepossessing, anhedonic, monothematic, flagrantly, punitively, cuckold. I don't mind the use of those words, but if they come forth in the first page of any novel, what will the rest be like? I don't mind reading difficult language, just don't make it a scientific text I need to suffer through.

Which bring me to my next point of annoyance. I had an inkling from the title that it might have an environmentral theme. The chapters I read were set in 2000, and with solar energy not yet having its boost we see today, the scientific explanation (utterly boring and in my opinion not needed in a work of fiction) he provides us with is too much. I don't need to know why a certain character does something. He's depicted to be a Nobel prize winner and I trust he has good reasons to do what he does, he doesn't need to explain everything.

Of course this novel can become better if you read further. There is mention of a turning point where the gloomy nobel prize winner stirs his life around, but I just haven't got the will to read more.
So many books to read, so little time, so I go on to the next, hopefully better one.

Take care and read my younglings.
xxx