Home Burial

By Paul Gray

THE CEMENT GARDEN by Ian McEwan

Simon & Schuster; 153 pages; $8.95

Dank dungeons, gothic ruins and rainswept mountain peaks are fine for inducing the creeps. But when it comes to high-grade macabre, there's no place like home. Take the London house furnished by British Author Ian McEwan, 29, in this tight, unsettling first novel. The place stands almost deserted amid urban rubble, one of the few survivors of a highway plan that went nowhere. In it live Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom, a reasonably normal array of siblings ranging in age from 17 to six, and their mother, who is dying. The earlier death of the father and the mother's terminal illness have produced an upsurge in slovenliness and disorder among the children. What happens when the last adult dies is the stuff of tabloid headlines and, surprisingly, good fiction.

Although he uses conventional methods, McEwan produces something well beyond the run of the chill. He meticulously establishes the plausibility of his unlikely tale. The isolation of the house and its inhabitants is crucial: things could not go wrong the way they do in the presence of prying neighbors. Also necessary is a large quantity of cement, an empty trunk in the basement and, later, a sledgehammer. Most important is the question of motivation. Faced with the fact of their mother's corpse and the fear of being dispersed as orphans by the authorities, the children act not out of evil but according to the relentless logic of expediency. What they do is less a comment on them than on the hairbreadth that separates the civilized from the unspeakable.

The falling apart of this household is seen through the eyes of Jack, 15, unattractive in a manner that only adolescent males can fully achieve. He has given up on personal hygiene, lusts after his older sister and spends most of his time alone in his room. Without any redeeming charm, he is nonetheless capable of evoking sympathy. Jack never deludes himself about the mess he has become; watching his sisters mourn, he notes: "I wished I could abandon myself like them, but I felt watched. I wanted to go and look at myself in the mirror." Long solitary walks take him to the remains of prefabricated houses that had been knocked down for the forgotten highway. Standing in one, he sees his own emptiness echoed in the world: "I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared."

The youth does not dwell on this point, and McEwan never links Jack's pathology to society at large. Preachiness and moralizing would only direct attention away from the immediacy that is the novel's strongest suit. Seen from the inside, the characters are simply beleaguered children trying to cope and, ultimately, failing. Outsiders find their degeneration criminal; the book shows the inadequacy of such a judgment. Aberrant acts fascinate because of their strangeness, and those who perform them are rarely able to make their reasons clear. The Cement Garden suggests that the most terrifying thing about such behavior is its mundane lack of mystery.

--Paul Gray

Editors' Choice

FICTION: Adjacent Lives, Ellen Schwamm .Faeries, Brian Fraud and Alan Lee .Short Stories, Irwin Shaw .Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer .The Stories of John Cheever. John Cheever .The World According to Garp, John Irving War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk

NONFICTION: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman .American Caesar, William Manchester .E.M. Forster: A Life, P.N. Furbank .In Search of History, Theodore H. White .Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie .The Annotated Shakespeare, A.L. Rowse .The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.