the anxiety of everyday objects

In his novel The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan creates a setting in which many of the aspects of suburban life that are conventionally considered to provoke feelings of safety, comfort, and familiarity, in fact provoke their opposites. In the world of Jack and his siblings, family life is disrupted by death and incestuous desire. The stability of community is removed by the destruction and slow decay of the surrounding houses and tower blocks, and the supposed reverie of childhood summers is portrayed as a festering wasteland of garbage and concrete.

In the absence of the stability that is meant to be provided by the orthodoxy of suburban life, a new context is created for even the smallest of things. Objects as commonplace as pipes, garden gloves, chests, mirrors, and bedroom furniture become disassociated from their former contexts and take on a sinister significance. In some cases inanimate objects become signifiers, and even take on the animate characteristics of their signified. This may be observed in the line “He replaced the pipe between his teeth like a missing section of his own anatomy” (11), and in Jack’s observation that “It struck me as funny at the time that [Julie] addressed the gloves and not me” (13). Repeatedly, similar uncanny instances provoke what Freud calls an “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not.”

As the novel progresses, the sense of objects accumulating and encroaching intensifies to the degree where they mirror the tangling weeds and vines that Jack’s father once worked so hard to keep out of his garden. In the kitchen, “Cigarette ends, plastic cutlery, old magazines, coffee cups and spilt coffee hung untidily about the room.” It is a scene that reminds Jack of the fictional Space Commander Hunt’s reminder that, in this foreign environment, “we do not have gravity to keep things in their place” (82). Similar to the absence of gravity, the absence of certainty in Jack’s environment allows it to take on a dreamlike life of its own, where the familiar landscape of domestic objects is no longer predictable.

Perhaps in as far as McEwan’s novel sets up distinctions between order and disorder, the natural and the artificial, it also blurs them, by allowing the static minutiae of the everyday to take on characteristics of the incontrollable.