Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English

Home , The Cement Garden, The Child in Time

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English

and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Andrea Kobrlová

Critical Events and Their Subsequent Development in the Novels of Ian McEwan Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D. 2010

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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Acknowledgement

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, who guided me through the whole process of writing, and without whose wholesome support I would not be able to produce such a text. His concrete critical comments were of great importance to me and I would especially like to thank him for his adaptability, encouragement and valuable insight.

Secondly, I would like to thank to my mum whose generous support and unstinting encouragement helped me to stay on my way and successfully complete my studies in the first place. I am especially grateful to her because she has been a constant source of advice and ideas to me and was there for me whenever I needed.

Lastly, I would like to thank to my family for their support and for the fact that they believed in me and enabled me to study the subject I love. I owe you much!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………….p. 5-11

2. The Cement Garden……………………………………………………….p. 12-24

3. The Child in Time…………………………………………………………p. 25-36

4. Conclusion………………………………………………………………....p. 37-42

5. List of Works Cited………………………………………………………...p.43

6. Resume (in English)………………………………………………………..p. 44

7. Resumé (česky)…………………………………………………………...... p. 45

Introduction

Ian Russell McEwan, one of the best-selling contemporary authors of the British literary scene, is well-known in the world for his macabre stories. His suggestive writing explores human mind, consciousness and above all the subconscious desires of humans. McEwan‟s writing career began with the publication of a collection of short-stories but what won him the worldwide critical acclaim were mainly his socially-oriented novels. For the topics he chooses, McEwan is often called „Ian Macabre‟ and not without a reason: death, murder, child abduction, incest, rape, sadomasochism, violence–the most controversial topics hidden in the contemporary society make up central part of his novels. In the peculiar description of valuable details and carefully constructed characters which really develop from the beginning to the end of a novel, McEwan is able to give the readers “a full sense of what it is to be someone else” (qtd. in Groes 2009: vii), as Matt Ridley notes on McEwan in the foreword to Groes‟ book.

It has been argued that the suggestive power of McEwan‟s writing lies in the fact that he lets the reader experience a serious critical event and then tries to convey the way to redemption or perdition: “What remains constant throughout McEwan‟s writing is less an interest in the macabre than in both delineating individual reactions to moments of crisis and presenting the tenderness and brutality of relationships without sentimentality” (Childs

2009: 6).

I would like to argue that the critical event is something which turns one‟s life upside down. It is something that changes one‟s family situation, the social position; it is reflected in the psychology and very often it does not stigmatize just the main character but also the people around him. In McEwan‟s books the critical moment is a starter of everything.

From the beginning everything leads up to a critical event and when it happens, the characters are immediately forced to cope with the current situation.

The strategy of using the critical moment as an engine of the narrative that gives direction to everything that follows is, however, not a completely new approach. The tradition of fatality goes back to such names as Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Fyodor

Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky or Vladimir Nabokov when I take into account for example the

Russian writers. Also McEwan himself acknowledged in an interview with Dave Weich the possible inspiration by these authors: “I want narrative authority. I want Chekhov, I want

Nabokov and Jane Austen. I want the authorial presence taking full responsibility for everything” (Groes 2009: 4).

The classic of the golden age of the Russian literature F. M. Dostoyevsky in his novel

Crime and Punishment uses the critical moment–the murder of the extortionist and her sister–to show the real impact of a murder on the psyche of the perpetrator. A young student Raskolnikov who cannot finish his studies due to lack of money, refuses an offer of his sister that she would find a rich husband to help him. Instead he plans a murder of an old extortionist. Because he considers her a threat to society, he defends the act morally and perceives it almost as a good turn. However, when it comes to murder, Raskolnikov is also forced to kill an unexpected witness–the extortionist‟s sister. Although he supposed that his psyche was strong, the event causes him shock and he nearly comes to madness.

Dostoyevsky in this way portrays a man who thinks he is able to plan a perfect crime but in the moment crisis he himself becomes a victim of his plans.

The situation which gets out of hand of the character is also a favourite strategy of

Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert Humbert, the main character of Nabokov‟s novel Lolita gets obsessed with the so called nymphets as a result of a critical event that happened to him in childhood. Compared to Raskolnikov he is not an agent of this event but his psyche, life 6

and sexual orientation are in this way fatally stigmatized. The childish, unfulfilled and tragic love causes him the lifelong sexual desire for young little girls which is the main topic of this psychological novel.

To prove that this is not only the case of the Russian classics I would also like to use the example from the Western world–Edgar Allan Poe, William Golding or William Styron are very well-known authors using the same kind of principle: “McEwan‟s early work makes effective use of the modern short story‟s traditional capacities, since this is a literary form often deemed to work best with a central organizing image or idea, or „single effect‟, in

Edgar Allan Poe‟s enduring formulation” (Head 2007: 33). Edgar Allan Poe is one of the founders of detective short stories and also an author of many macabre short stories and– from which I will choose my next example. “The Cask of Amontillado” offers several key moments which surprise the reader and radical influence the flow of the narration. The main character Montresor experiencing many insults from his rival Fortunato one day decides for revenge. He plans every step very carefully while using the fact that Fortunato loves wine and is said to be a wine expert. Under false pretence to recognize the

Amontillado wine Montresor leads Fortunato mazy catacombs and in cold blood he ties him to a most distant wall in a granite recess, which he subsequently walls up. While reading the short story the reader still hopes the situation to be resolved and so he is surprised and astounded by the cruelty and definitiveness of the act. Again here we can trace the strategy of portraying the critical event which leads to an overwhelming ending.

The suggestiveness of this short story also lies in the perfect description of the environment which does not disturb the story but rather completes the reader‟s psychical image of the place thank to the use of carefully chosen details. It seems that Poe leads the reader through the cavern together with Fortunato and Montresor and thus enables him direct participation in the act. This is also an approach which Poe and McEwan share: “The

novelist‟s privilege, according to Ian McEwan, is to step inside the consciousness of others and to lead the reader there like a psychological Virgil” (Groes 2009: vii).

Much later in the second half of the twentieth century William Styron takes the reader on a similar walk through the life of Sophia Zawistowska with help of the narrator–young writer Stingo. The novel Sophie‟s Choice includes several critical events which play an important role in the lives of the main characters. The character of Stingo enables Styron to retell the whole Sophie‟s personal history and also to report her present life situation. The true historical facts are mingling with her personal experiences so that the reader must create his own version of the book‟s reality. The critical events serve here as supporting piers of the narrative–the only truths, the only certainties of the story. As an example I could use the best known situation when Sophie is forced to choose which of her two children will survive which turns out to a fatal event that stigmatizes her life forever.

Whether these authors influenced McEwan or not, the strategy of inclusion of a critical event as a disruptive influence which reshapes the narrative seems to be very popular in many of his books. Beginning with the earliest short-stories, there could be found a strong tendency to use a critical event for culmination of the plot. The former but also the latter novels by McEwan share this common feature. The Innocent, a novel published in 1990, tells a story of British and American cooperation in Berlin after the Second World War through the character of Leonard–British telephone technician. After falling in love with

Maria, a German girl, Leonard discovers she has problems with her ex-husband Otto.

Subsequently Leonard is forced by the situation to kill Otto, which creates the critical event in the story. McEwan uses the murder and subsequent dismembering of Otto‟s body as a critical moment, stigmatizing Maria and Leonard with blood and guilt, which they are not able to get over. Their relationship is falling apart just as the pieces of Otto‟s body. In addition, the nervousness and distrust lead to Leonard‟s decision not to come back from 8

England after seeing Bob Glass together with Maria, assuming that they have an affair.

Their plans for wedding and future cohabitation disappear in the mist of fury and envy and the shared secret which could unite them more than anything else, finally results in their separation.

Such a disastrous moment, which attacks the characters and forces them to react, is considered somehow characteristic for McEwan‟s writing. I could also provide one example from his more recent writing–the contemporary bestseller–Atonement, published in 2001. In this novel the moment of crisis comes right at the beginning–it is a Briony‟s lie which results in Robbie‟s unjust imprisonment. Right from the beginning of the novel

McEwan pursues the chain of events leading to the act of foolishness which under circumstances turns into a fatal event. It begins with the scene at the garden fountain, when

Cecilia just in her underwear jumps into the water to find the broken pieces of a vase, to which Briony becomes a witness. Briony transmits the sexual tension between Cecilia and

Robbie as a danger to her beloved sister and this notion is only supported by a letter which

Robbie later sends to Cecilia via Briony. Again a fatal mistake occurs when Robbie by accident chooses a vulgar letter instead of an apology. Briony reveals her worries and the content of the letter to Lola and together they get convinced that Robbie must be a sexual maniac who could threaten Cecilia. However Cecilia does not feel endangered but instead she realizes through the nasty letter that she is actually in love with Robbie; and when he comes for the dinner they end up in a library in a sexual intercourse. Briony again by accident becomes a witness of this event and it reinforces her persuasion about Robbie‟s corruption. When later at night it comes to Lola‟s rape, Briony blames Robbie for committing it. Based on her testimony Robbie is the same night arrested and imprisoned.

Sequence of these events totally disrupts the expected flow of narrative and leads to a tragic ending. The fate of the three main characters is forever changed. As Alastair Cormack

points out: “Fiction is presented as a lie – a lie that, if believed, comforts, distorts and finally produces unethical action” (Groes 2009: 10).

Precisely the critical event and also its impact on the narrative and on the development of characters will be in the central focus of my thesis. I will try to identify and interpret the major critical events of two novels and analyze the way Ian McEwan subsequently develops them. For this purpose I have chosen one early novel, The Cement Garden, published in the beginning of McEwan‟s career in 1978 and The Child in Time, a far more complex novel from 1987. I have chosen these two not only because they attracted my attention but particularly because of their obvious dissimilarity; because in the conclusion, I would also like compare and contrast several issues of my interest.

One of the major differences between these two books lies in the choice of the narrative perspective. While The Cement Garden gains its suggestible power from the choice of I-narrator, The Child in Time captivates the reader mainly by the range of topics which are possible to be discussed only thank to the use of the third person narrator. What

I would like to point out is the author‟s shift from a simple storyline to a very complex and carefully constructed multiple plot. As McEwan himself noted in an interview: “The turning point for [him] was The Child in Time, when political, moral, social, comic, and other possibilities moved in” (Weich 2004: 2).

Apart from the critical events and narrative strategies I would also like to deal with the way Ian McEwan develops his characters. In my opinion the critical events have a significant influence on the reader‟s perception of the characters and therefore I would like to further analyze the protagonists from both novels and consider their portrayal before and after the major critical events. The progress of the characters will serve me as an analogy to the progress of the novels, so I will try to comment on both the literary

strategies employed in the development of the plot and the description of consequences of the critical events.

Chapter 1 - The Cement Garden

The Cement Garden is a first longer work published by Ian McEwan. It came out in the year 1978 after two collections of macabre short-stories which laid the ground for

McEwan‟s later achievements: “The early work forms an intricate part of the entire oeuvre, and an important foundation without which the later work could not have emerged, and it also contains many of the thematic and obsessions that he continues to explore, in a more subtle and refined way, in the later works” (Groes 2009: 7).

The Cement Garden reassumes the tradition of a novel focusing on children which has its roots in the English Romantic tradition. Beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau the idea of childhood began to shift: “Nature wants children to be children before they are men …

Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them” (qtd. in Williams 1996: 212). The concept of the original innocence replaced the prevailing image of children portrayed as little adults and the process of growing-up was gaining more and importance. Among the founders of the novel “with its true centre of focus on a child” is according to Peter Coveney Charles

Dickens with his novel Oliver Twist (qtd. in Williams 1996: 212). This Victorian novelist mainly tried to point out the social problems concerning children in the period.

As a result of development in medical sciences such as psychiatry and psychology, there is no longer a focus on the fate and personal history of a child, but writers began to be interested more in their consciousness, inner development and hidden desires:

“By stressing the importance of infantile sexuality and Oedipal impulses, and

thereby undermining the concept of the „pristine innocence of childhood‟,

Freud was to provide 20th century writers with new ways of depicting

childhood and adolescence. With the removal of Victorian taboos, the 12

child/adolescent in fiction becomes more complex and less lovable” (Williams

1996: 214).

One of the most famous novels following this modern tradition is William Golding‟s Lord of the Flies. It is a work which seems to strongly influence McEwan‟s The Cement Garden:

“But whereas Golding‟s children run wild fighting each other, McEwan‟s grow closer together, and the reader is reminded how the adult world provides checks not on their natural aggression but on their natural sexuality” (Childs 2009: 34). Both the works show what can happen with children living in isolation without influence of the parental authority. While Golding uses as a critical moment a plane which crashes on an isolated island, McEwan situates his narrative on a desolate periphery of a city and uses the death of the parents as a starting point.

The first critical moment the reader must face in The Cement Garden is a death of the father, which comes in the very beginning of the story. The narrator Jack starts his narration with recalling the day the father died:

“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 […] 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” (McEwan 2006: 9).

This quote shows above all the lack of emotions between Jack and father since he marks the father‟s death as “insignificant”. The first sentence of the citation could be actually pointing at the Jack‟s departure to the bathroom while he was cementing the garden with the father. After several rounds of mixing the cement Jack gets bored and decides to leave for a while and masturbate – an activity not unusual in his daily routine. After experiencing 13

his first ejaculation, which impresses him a lot more than the cooperation with father, he gets back to the garden and finds the father dead: “Jack in fact appears emotionally underdeveloped from the beginning of the novel: his father‟s death is Oedipally related as

“insignificant” in the context of the story Jack tells, except for its temporal coincidence with his first ejaculation […]Jack is preoccupied with his body, particularly its new adolescent productions: acne and semen” (Childs 2009: 2009: 35).

The relationship between Jack and father seems almost non-existent and if the reader notices certain details, he comes to the conclusion that Jack perceives the father not as a real father but rather as a man who just accepted his life role. He admires father‟s restrained behaviour, the way he communicates, his authority and cold mind: “‟Out of the question‟ I said through an imaginary pipe. „That‟s the end of it‟” (McEwan 2006: 12). The imitation of father‟s behaviour in addition reveals Jack‟s hidden desire to manipulate with the others and rule them.

However not only Jack but also the rest of the family suffers from father‟s incapacity.

Little Tom must compete with him for mother‟s attention and as Tom wins, the father teases him with envy for every small offence. Although Julie is a member of the school athletics team and has ambitions to become the best, the father does not take her seriously and never comes to any of her race, as Jack informs the reader. Also father‟s relationship with the Mother is portrayed as disharmonious–in the first chapter the reader can notice several arguments between them two.

The father biologically belongs to the family but nobody has a true relationship with him. The definitive effacement of the father‟s character comes at the end of the first chapter when: “[Jack] did not have a thought in [his] head as [he] picked up the plank and carefully smoothed away his impression in the soft, fresh concrete“ (McEwan 2006: 19). In

this way Jack determines himself as the next head of the family and for a while it seems that he will take over the father‟s role: “McEwan does not suggest that if adults are removed, children revert to any kind of „savage‟ state but that they will adapt, and adapt to, the role models that the removed adults provided for them” (Childs 2009: 34). This projection could also remind the reader for the first time of the Oedipal complex which begins to rise in Jack‟s mind.

After the mournful introduction the reader starts to penetrate into the inner structure and the true relationships of the family. Jack, the narrator combines the description of the life of the family and their environment with his personal thoughts and opinions on the family members. In between the individual events McEwan gradually discloses the message of the mother‟s illness:

“My mother, drained by another night without sleep, was not eating. Her

sunken eyes were grey and watery” (McEwan 2006: 22) or “It was about the

time that Mother more and more frequently went to bed in the early evening.

She said she could barely keep awake. „A few early nights in a row,‟ she would

say, „and I‟ll be myself again‟” (McEwan 2006: 31).

The only person who is fully informed about the situation, which comes out only afterwards, is Julie who soon begins to use her power to take over the role of both parents in spite of the siblings‟ objections. Angela Roger argues that generally: “On the death of the father, the culture of the family becomes overwhelmingly female-oriented, dominance enhanced by the rise of the power of Julie when Mother dies” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 38-9). At one moment Jack says: “She was suddenly so remote from us, quiet, certain of her authority. I wanted to say to her „Come on, Julie, stop pretending. We know who you are really.‟” (McEwan 2006: 32).

The reader starts to realize the importance of the Mother‟s illness and its significant role in the story only after she takes to bed. The last moment before the second critical event is the dialogue of Jack and Mother, in which she reveals to him that she will spend some time in the hospital, and asks Jack to help Julie with the household. Thereby she also warns Jack that if he does not take care of the house and his siblings, they could be put to care and subsequently they could lose their house. In this remark I see a certain explanation of their behaviour after the mother‟s death, which comes immediately afterwards causing not only shock on the reader‟s side, but mainly a great disruption in the narrative. From this point on, everything is viewed as a consequence of the critical event–the loss of the parents.

The first, who discover the Mother‟s death, are Julie and soon after Jack. The reactions of both of them are perceived by the reader as somewhat strange and unusual. Julie behaves very calm and cries only then when Sue comes home, Jack on the contrary cries immediately but not for the Mother but for the loss of his power: “‟I‟m in charge, too,‟ I said and began to cry because I felt cheated. My mother had gone without explaining to

Julie what she had told me. Not to the hospital, but gone completely, and there could be no verification” (McEwan 2006: 53). Jack reacts in this way because “not even his mother‟s death manages to break down his wall of egocentricity” (Williams 1996: 221). The only one who reacts in an expected way is the little Tom and probably Sue, who is the first one to point out: “Towards the end of the next day […], „Don‟t you think we ought to tell someone?” (McEwan 2006: 57). She provokes a discussion about what should be done and finally the children decide to bury the mother‟s body in a chest in the cellar and cover it with concrete. The main argument is stated by Jack who transmits the mother‟s warning about putting the young ones into care and about the demolition of the house. Their decision is also much influenced by the fact that they have the cement and sand which

should have been used for the father‟s project of „the cement garden‟. In spite of the fact that all of them agree, later in the story Jack reflects his uncertainty about this decision:

“It was not at all clear to me now why we had put her in the trunk in the first

place. At the time it had been obvious, to keep the family together. Was that

good reason? It might have been more interesting to be apart. Nor could I

think whether what we have done was an ordinary thing to do, understandable

even if it had been a mistake, or something so strange that if it was ever found

it would be the headline of every newspaper in the country” (McEwan 2006:

88-9).

What follows the decision is a very detailed description of their effort to realize what they planned. McEwan uses this mechanical process to let the children re-consider their feelings about the mother and give them space to express them:

“When we set her down on the sheet, she looked so frail and sad in her

nightdress, lying at our feet like a bird with a broken wing, that for the first

time I cried for her and not for myself. […]Julie‟s face was wet too when we

knelt down by Mother and tried to roll her over in the sheet” (McEwan 2006:

63).

For all the children the critical moment of the mother‟s death is a key starter of their efforts to liberate themselves from the social conventions and adapt for the situation in their own way. At one moment Jack describes his feelings as: “When Mother died, beneath my strongest feelings was a sense of adventure and freedom which I hardly dared to admit myself and which was derived from the memory of that day five years ago. But there was no excitement now” (McEwan 2006: 71). With her death the last authority leaves the house and the children are truly left alone. The division to the critical events and their further 17

development reflects itself also in the structure of the book because with the burial of the mother‟s body, the first part of the book ends and the second one, which considers the further development of the children and the true impact of their isolation, begins. McEwan gives space mainly to the children‟s subconscious desires which immediately start to infiltrate the narrative. He portrays the way of each of the four children to disruptive influence and post-traumatic self-realization.

The life in the house does not change immediately. McEwan foreshadows the weak side of every child throughout the novel right from the beginning: “[…] John Carey sees far greater meaning in the children‟s response to orphanhood and suggests a continuity between the family before and after the parents‟ deaths” (Childs 2009: 36). Peter Childs also mentions in his book McEwan‟ characterization of the change “[…] as a kind of hibernation” (Childs 2009: 37) This is in fact also the original thought which dominated the genesis of The Cement Garden according to Ian McEwan. In Childs‟ opinion:

“This echoes Jack„s own comment that in the long day after mother‟s death

„the house seemed to have fallen asleep‟ (71). It is a sleep that lasts until the

end of the novel when Julie‟s boyfriend Derek and the authorities arrive to

break up Jack‟s somniloquy, the family, and the concrete in the cellar, at which

point Julie remarks, in the last words of the novel ‟wasn‟t that a lovely sleep‟

(138)” (Childs 2009: 37).

It is manifested also partly by the description of the suburb, which seems to be also in some kind of a somnolent state, because, as Jack informs the reader, the houses standing around were knocked down to enable the building of a highway which was never realized.

Partly it is also displayed in the children‟s activities:

“Julie sunbathes drowsily outside, Sue curls up to write in her diary, and Tom

reverts to the cot. Jack describes his life in these terms: „I woke in the late

morning, masturbated and dozed off again. I had dreams, not exactly

nightmares, but bad dreams that I struggled to wake out of […]. Some

afternoons I fell asleep in the armchair even though I had only been awake a

couple of hours‟” (Childs 2009: 37).

The functioning and movement of the house are catalyzed by the mother‟s death and the children soon begin to neglect their basic habits and abuse their independence: “For a week after the burial we did not eat a cooked meal. Julie went to the post office for money and came home with bags of shopping, but the vegetables and meat she bought lay around untouched until they had to be thrown away. Instead we ate bread, cheese, peanut butter, biscuits and fruit” (McEwan 2006: 73).

Apart from the practical consequences which are expected and understandable, each of the children develops a special way of escape from the tension of reality. Tom, the youngest, above all seeks a substitute for the dead mother and finds it in Julie who takes over the maternal role and satisfies his desire to be a baby again. In fact she directly supports this deviation by placing his bed next to hers, putting him to sleep every day very early, and all in all behaving towards him as if he were a really small baby. In addition,

Tom‟s fondness of girls‟ clothes, originating in the desire to escape the school aggressors, is deepened by Sue and Julie who regularly dress Tom into these clothes and convert him to girl. Later Tom exhibits this tendency not only at home but also out in the street where he plays with one of his friends to „Jack and Julie‟. In the beginning, Jack cannot reconcile with the feminisation process but gradually he gets to a state when he takes it as normal‟ and perhaps desirable. Angela Carter mentions a moment: “When Julie ties a ribbon

around [Jack‟s] neck” and “he lets her, so that he can feel included as a girl” (qtd. in Childs

2009: 39).

Sue also suffers from the consequences of the parents‟ loss but the other way round as opposed to Tom. She does not seek any compensating authority but she rather locks herself up and except for Julie she does not speak much to anybody. She spends most of the time in her bedroom writing in her notebook. On one occasion Jack finds out that she addresses her reports to Mum:

“She put down the pencil when I came in and snapped the book shut. It was

stuffy as if she had been in there for hours. […] „What are you doing?‟ I said at

last and stared at the notebook. „Nothing,‟ she said, „just writing.‟ […] „What

are you writing?‟ She sighed. „Nothing. Just writing.‟ I tore the book from her

hands, turned my back on her and opened it. Before she blocked my view with

her arm I had time to read at the top of a page, „Tuesday, Dear Mum.‟”

(McEwan 2006: 72-3).

Sue mourns for her loss individually, alone. Sometimes she goes down to the cellar, sits on a stool and speaks to the mother‟s body lying in the chest. All the same, the manifestation of her loss is mainly internal and it further deepens her tendency to close up.

Although the role of Tom and Sue is crucially important for the book; still the reader gets a feeling that the most significant impact of the critical events is on the side of Jack and Julie. It is probably caused by choice of the narrator–Jack who logically follows particularly his personal story, which is very much mingling with Julie‟s, since Jack is attracted to her right from the beginning of the book. The reader can notice this fact by several markers. First of all there are the perfectionist descriptions effusing love and sexual desire: “the pale-brown, slim legs flickering across the green like blades” (Mcwan 2006: 20). 20

Next indicator could surely be seen in Jack‟s fantasies bespoken usually in connection with his numerous auto-erotic visits of the bathroom. Thirdly, there is also Jack‟s omnipresent desire to be with her, to talk to her and to receive her full attention. After the mother‟s death he does not take well the power Julie claims to possess, but despite this fact, to certain extent he respects her and often acquiesces to her will–for instance in the garden scene when he finds a sledge-hammer and wants to break the „cement garden‟. David

Sampson notes that: “[…] after her mother‟s death Julie, the eldest child, becomes both surrogate-father and surrogate-mother and so is the obscure object of Jack‟s desire and rivalry” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 40). Their relationship is developing slowly and gradually but the reader can feel that certain tension diffuses through the whole narrative. Carter argues that: “The relationship between Jack and Julie in The Cement Garden moves inexorably from normal sibling affection to incest. In between, the pair engages in a power struggle which Julie easily wins. Julie is nevertheless portrayed as a subject of affection and admiration for her brother, Jack” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 38).

The shared trauma of the loss catalyzes their relationship for a moment and it seems that their ways almost split; however the final incestuous scene reveals the true state of things and their love is at last manifested by sexual intercourse. Angela Carter evaluates this moment as follows:

“Jack and Julie achieve their most harmonious moment in the incestuous scene

which closes the novel. The brother-sister incest fulfils two functions: it

emphasizes the closeness of the siblings, preceded as it is with their exploration

of the differences and similarities of their bodies; and attempts to keep the

family together” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 40).

What I would like to also stress out, is the difference in their behaviour after the mother‟s death. While Julie seeks an external compensation in a relationship with Derek and tries to fill the gap by activity and taking care of her siblings; Jack deals primarily with himself, his body and appearance, and compared to Julie he prefers non-activity, sleeping and aimless hanging around.

There is a certain paradox in Jack‟s self-obsession which is only deepened by the absence of any authority. Although he totally neglects the personal hygiene, does not change his clothes and the only part of his body he is interested in is his penis, he seems to be deeply fascinated by his appearance. He spends hours just looking at his reflection in the mirror and investigating his face: “I masturbated each morning and afternoon, and drifted through the house, from one room to another, sometimes surprised to find myself in my bedroom, lying on my back staring at the ceiling, when I had intended to go out into the garden. I looked at myself carefully in the mirror. What was wrong with me?” (McEwan

2006: 74). His ego-centrism is also manifested by lack of interest about the other family members and his ignorant and rude behaviour towards them. At one moment Sue explodes with anger and upbraids Jack for his unbearable behaviour not only towards them but also towards Mother:

“Sue spoke quickly. „You never understood anything about her. You were

always horrible at her.‟ „That‟s a lie,‟ I said loudly, and after a few seconds I

repeated, „That‟s a lie.‟ Sue sat on the edge of her bed, her back straight and

one hand resting on her pillow. When she spoke she stared mournfully in front

of her. „You never did anything she asked you. You never did anything to help.

You were always too full of yourself, just like you are now‟” (McEwan 2006:

98).

In fact Jack is fully accepted by the girls only in the final scene when he and Julie are for the first time able to talk freely about everything what happened and get almost unbelievably close. Finally they are able to find consolation in each other–but in fact it is just another kind of virtual reality of the house which is disrupted by the alien Derek.

My supposition is that the incestuous relationship between Jack and Julie is deeply rooted in the dysfunctional mother–father relationship and the critical event serves here as a trigger. All the children suffer from lack of sensibility and Jack, for instance, finds his compensation in auto-eroticism. In his case–sexuality substitutes the strong family relationships which are almost missing.

When the children lose their parents completely, their social limitations are destroyed and in effort to keep the family together they do what they see as natural and safe. This strategy originates in McEwan‟s “[…] idea that in the nuclear family the kind of forces that are being suppressed–the oedipal, incestuous forces–are also paradoxically the very forces which keep the family together” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 35). The children no longer behave like children–the critical events push them to the world of adults for which they are not ready yet. After all, they are too young and therefore they are predestined to fail.

One of the most interesting features of The Cement Garden is its narrative technique:

“The question of the narrator in fiction featuring the child or adolescent poses

an intriguing problem. Writing in the third person gives the omniscient (and

therefore adult) narrator free access to all the possible nuances of the English

language; but there is the danger that the special flavour of infantile or

adolescent experience may be lost in the telling with respect to the immediacy

of a first-person narrative” (Williams 1996: 215).

However, although the choice of the first person child narrator brings a lot of good into the narrative: “the thoughts and sensations of a mind that has not yet achieved full maturity,” it also complicates the writer‟s situation because of the struggle between authenticity of the child‟s voice and artistic eloquence of the writing style (Williams 1996:

216),. Christopher Williams discusses in his essay two possibilities how to solve this question–either to really adapt the style to the actual child age or to choose a retrospective point of view, which is the case of The Cement Garden: “By looking back on one‟s youth from the pinnacle of adulthood, the writer is legitimately entitled to use the full range of his or her descriptive powers” (Williams 1996: 216).

Ian McEwan probably chose this narrative view because it enabled him to fully develop an authentic story combined with detailed descriptions of the environment, characters and also things and thoughts flowing in Jack‟s immature mind. He comments on his choice as follows: “The problem is, as an author you want it both ways. You want your narrator to carry lines which are your best lines. If you have a first person narrator, who else can you give your best lines to?” (qtd. in Williams 1996: 218). And most probably McEwan gave his readers his “best lines” since as Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín agreed: “There is not a false note in the whole book; McEwan makes you feel that this is, perhaps, what you would do too under similar circumstances” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 37).

Chapter 2 – The Child in Time

The Child in Time is a novel which “marks a turning point in McEwan‟s career: it was his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length, and his first sustained attempt at a social novel, in which the private and the public are systematically intertwined” (Head

2007: 70). With his third novel Ian McEwan disclosed the ability of great social feeling– especially in portraying the development of a relationship disturbed by experiencing a child abduction; and at the same time he proved to readers and also to critics the capacity to encompass “the political, moral, social, comic, and other possibilities,” which “moved in” to his writing according to his own words (qtd. in Weich 2004: 1).

The novel was firstly published in 1987 and according to Dominic Head it was much influenced by two preceding works by McEwan–the libretto to an oratorio of Michael

Berkeley Or Shall We Die released in print in 1984, and a television screenplay The

Ploughman’s Lunch, which was published in 1985: “In his own account, it was after realizing these projects, with their moral and political directness, and two months after The

Ploughman’s Lunch in 1983, that McEwan turned in the summer of that year, to writing The

Child in Time, a project he was not to complete until 1986” (Head 2007: 73).

Allan Massie considers the book as “belong[ing] to the tradition of the „Condition of

England Novel‟”–the socially-oriented novel which reached its climax in the Victorian era

(qtd. in Childs 2009: 62). And The Child in Time is truly a social novel. The title of the book suggests not only several themes employed by McEwan but also the major story, which partly is about a child which comes literally „in time‟. A couple experiencing the loss of a child is but a tip of the iceberg in the novel because the range of the topics employed is, as opposed to The Cement Garden, enormous: the relationship and the border between childhood and adulthood; the inner child which dwells within us all; the British political

future and authoritarian public policy; the concept of time, its relativity and new pieces of knowledge taken from the laws of the new physics; and above all the traditional McEwan‟s domain–the family and social relationships and particularly the communication between men and women. “The Child in Time met with general critical approval but also with a certain surprise that McEwan had broadened out from the somewhat claustrophobic concerns of the short stories and of his first two novels” (Childs 2009: 59).

McEwan uses two parallel stories to build up a vision of the future Britain and capture an inner development of two contrasting couples experiencing a crisis. The major story depicts a writer Stephen and his wife, musician Julie, who after experiencing the loss of a child, try to cope with an empty space in their lives and find the way back to each other.

The context of the main topic is rooted in British social history:

“In the 1990s and beyond, British society became deeply preoccupied with

child abduction and paedophilia–indeed this became a media obsession–and

McEwan‟s novel anticipates the ways in which this topic has become a central

issue in the society‟s struggle to understand itself” (Head 2007: 73).

The child plays an important role also in the second parallel story, but this time in another sense. It is the story of Stephen‟s friend, a publisher and later a political representative, Charles Darke, and his emancipated wife, physicist Thelma, who are forced to leave the public life and to fulfil the Charles‟s hidden desire to become a child again.

Adam Mars Jones emphasizes that “Charles Darke‟s wife delivers the verdict on her husband that his case „“was just an extreme form of a general problem”‟, men‟s inability to carry over the virtues of their immaturity into adulthood” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 63-4). This quote summarizes the problem Stephen is also dealing with. The idea, probably originating in William Blake‟s writing, that the “mature individual has to balance the child and the adult,

like the ego balancing the demands of the superego and the id” concerns not only explicitly the character of Charles but also Stephen who “as an adult has lost the child within himself” and he tries to restore him throughout the novel (Childs 2009: 65).

Since Stephen‟s inner development occupies the major part of the novel, I have decided to devote most of my attention to this central character and analyse the major critical events, which are especially highlighted by McEwan, and describe the ways these are subsequently developed. I would like to depict the stages in the rehabilitation process

Stephen experiences after the loss of his daughter Kate which perhaps intentionally correspond with the phases of “Grief and Mourning in Adult Life” described by John

Bowlby and Colin Parkes: “numbness, yearning and searching for the lost figure, disorganization and despair, and the last phase of greater or less degree of reorganization”

(Bowlby 2005: 101). I would also like to stress the contrasts with Julie‟s reaction which served McEwan to depict the gender differences, similarities and perhaps even to cross gender stereotypes.

In addition I would like to mention the story of Charles Darke to discuss its obvious influence on Stephen. Therefore I will try to capture the most important crucial moments which contributed to Stephen‟s development.

Lastly, I would like to discuss the narrative point of view, because I would like to prove, its influence on the complexity of the topics covered in the book. I will finish this chapter with one of the most striking aspect of the text–the carefully built structure, which serves to highlight the critical events and support the complexity of the image Ian McEwan tries to convey.

The first critical moment the reader must, along with Stephen and Julie, face is the loss of their daughter Kate, which is retrospectively described by Stephen in the first chapter of 27

The Child in Time. McEwan thus establishes an introductory situation which serves him as a starting point of the novel. The fact that the event is described in the past tense allows the author to include a number of details in order to show Stephen‟s desperate effort to remember something important which was previously left unnoticed. The most explicit example is when Stephen tries to recall what he bought in the supermarket:

“What else did he buy? Toothpaste, tissues, washing-up liquid, and best bacon,

a leg of lamb, […] And who was there when his hand reached for these items?

Someone who followed him as he pushed Kate along the stacked aisles, who

stood a few paces off when he stopped, who pretended to be interested in a

label and then continued when he did? He had been back a thousand times,

seen his own hand, […] and tried to move his eyes, lift them against the weight

of time” (McEwan 1992: 11).

The tone of the narration seems to signal from the beginning that some challenge lies ahead. This supports the notion Ian McEwan once reported in an interview that: “You built your world through impressions so that the state of the street or the weather was your route into the character‟s mind” (qtd. in Weich 2004: 2). In the case of The Child in Time the signs indicating the future development are revealed exactly this way. For instance when McEwan portrays the way to the supermarket, he gives space to miniature details:

“Lying in the sun by the steps was a flattened Coca-Cola can whose straw remained in place, still three-dimensional”; and foreshadowing metaphors:

“They stepped outdoors as though into a storm. The main road was an arterial

route south, its traffic rushed with adrenal ferocity. The bitter, anti-cyclonic day

was to serve an obsessive memory well with a light of brilliant explicitness, a

cynical eye for detail” (McEwan 1992: 10).

The depiction of the state of weather in this case gives the reader a hint of the future negative event: “the storm”, “the bitter, anti-cyclonic day”; but also a metaphor for the road–“an arterial route” which “rushes with adrenal ferocity” symbolizes a busy street in which anything could happen.

The careful description of all the steps preceding Kate‟s loss is in contrast with the description of the actual critical event. Whereas the detailed word-painting has a slowing effect on the flow of the narrative; the simple sentence: “Kate was gone” enables the reader to experience the absolute abruptness of the moment (McEwan 1992: 12). The authenticity of the critical experience supports the description of gradual loss of hope that the situation will somehow clear up as a misunderstanding:

“He expected to see her emerging from behind the lines of shoppers at the

checkouts. It was easy enough to overlook a child in the first flash of concern,

to look too hard, too quickly. Still, a sickness and a tightening at the base of the

throat, an unpleasant lightness in the feet, were with him as he went back”

(McEwan 1992: 13).

McEwan thus claims that the physical realisation foregoes the mental one. Through depiction of an immediate reaction of the character to such a crucial life situation McEwan skilfully transmits a general life experience that everybody is despite the participation of the other people always alone with his sorrow: “The lost child was everyone‟s property. But

Stephen was alone” (McEwan 1992: 14). McEwan describes the definitive acceptance of the critical event only at the end of the penultimate chapter fragment when Stephen must face the necessity of informing Julie about it: “He saw how rigorously simple it was – he had gone shopping with his daughter, lost her, and was now returning without her to tell his wife” (McEwan 1992: 17).

At the very end of the first chapter there appears a comparison of reactions of the parents who in result of the event begin to estrange:

“Initially there had been bustle of the bleakest kind: interviews with senior

policemen, teams of constables […] During that time Stephen and Julie had

clung to one another, sharing dazed rhetorical questions, awake in bed all night,

theorising hopefully one moment, despairing the next. But that was before

time, the heartless accumulation of days, had clarified the absolute, bitter truth.

Silence drifted in and thickened” (McEwan 1992: 20).

There is an explicit contrast between the immediate reaction when the parents have to cooperate with the authorities, and the further development when they must face the bare fact and cope with the consequences on the basis of their character and perhaps also gender: “[…] the gender politics of the novel have thus been scrutinized by critics as much as those of The Comfort of Strangers. There should, however, be a sense of progression within the book after the early responses that Stephen and Julie have to Kate‟s disappearance” (Childs 2009: 64). McEwan mainly compares Stephen‟s desperate search for Kate with the lethargy into which Julie falls and thus demonstrates the distinctness of their grief:

“They went their different ways, he with his lists and daily trudging, she in her

armchair, lost to deep, private grief. Now there was no mutual consolation, no

touching, no love. Their old intimacy, their habitual assumption that they were

on the same side was dead. They remained huddled over their separate losses,

and unspoken resentments began to grow” (McEwan 1992: 20).

The growing estrangement of the couple results in Julie‟s abandoning Stephen which creates the second critical event significantly influencing Stephen‟s life. McEwan at first 30

shows Stephen‟s apathy and inability to react, then subsequent breakdown and a gradual realization of the reality which moves him to the third phase of a grieving process according to Bowlby and Parkes, which is “disorganization and despair” (Bowlby 2005:

101):

“All the while, it seemed, there was something gathering in the silence about

him, a slow surge of realization […] which bore him in the small hours to the

first full flood of understanding of the true nature of his loss. Everything

before had been fantasy, a routine and frenetic mimicry of sorrow. Just before

dawn he began to cry, and it was from this moment in the semi-darkness that

he was to date his time of mourning” (McEwan 1992: 23).

The disorganization in Stephen‟s case does not mean only wasted time spent in front of the TV and litres of consumed alcohol:

“A new all-day channel had opened, sponsored by the Government and

specializing in game and chat shows, commercials and phone-ins. Stephen,

sprawled out with his Scotch on the couch in pyjamas and thick cardigan,

watched the game shows with and addict‟s glazed patience” (McEwan 1992:

134).

But it also means the search for a certainty which Stephen associates mainly with the image of home Therefore he visits his parents more often and in the third chapter he pays an important visit to Julie, which does not solve their problems definitively, but during the act of love they conceive a child, which signifies a future hope. The presence of a child is hidden not only to Stephen but also to the reader and its true significance in the story is revealed only in the last chapter when Julie and Stephen together deliver this child.

The third critical event marking Stephen‟s entrance to the last phase of grief, which is

“reorganization”, represents the car accident that he experiences in the fifth chapter

(Bowlby 2005:101). After a large pink lorry crashes on the road, Stephen is forced to fight for his own life and react on the situation by masterfully squeezing his car through the only narrow gap, thus experiencing spiritual rebirth: “Now in this slowing of time, there was a sense of a fresh beginning. He had entered a much later period in which all the terms and conditions had changed. So these were the new rules, and he experienced something like awe […]” (Mcewan 1992: 100-101).

In the first moment after saving his life Stephen thinks about Julie and realizes the sense of belonging and the mental alliance he shares with her. As Ellen Pifer in addition points out: “Stephen‟s sense of rebirth is validated by his rescue of the truck driver stuck in the overturned cab […]” (qtd. in Childs 2009: 67). The description of the rescue is strikingly similar to the final description of the birth of a new child which Stephen must deliver together with Julie. Another interesting motive in the description of the accident is the decision of the rescued person, Joe, to leave his girlfriend and come back to his wife and children. The re-evaluation of Joe‟s life serves McEwan to show the family as the most important life certainty. The careful reader can foresee at this moment the appetizer of

Stephen‟s future development.

However, Stephen‟s comeback is not a sudden matter; it is rather a gradual process full of painful events which in the end separate him from the world of his memories. One of them is “the disintegration of a politician whose public life, as his wife puts it, has been „all frenetic compensation for what he took to be an excess of vulnerability‟” (qtd. in Childs

2009: 62). The politician is Charles Darke, Stephen‟s publisher and later friend whose life is severely influenced by mental illness consisting of his desire to be a child. McEwan

portrays roughly three main stages in Darke‟s story which significantly influence Stephen‟s life.

The first moment comes when Stephen must face the decision of Thelma and Charles to move to their cottage in Suffolk. In the beginning Stephen is not able to recognize the seriousness of the situation and considers the removal as exclusively Thelma‟s decision.

This is only supported by several Thelma‟s remarks which give Stephen a certain hint but the whole truth is not yet revealed to him: “‟We‟ve decided that we can‟t tell you it all at once. In fact, we think we‟d rather show you than tell you. So be patient, you‟ll know it all sooner or later. You‟re the only one we‟ll be taking into our confidence, so…‟” (McEwan

1992: 40).

Stephen gets to know the true nature of things together with the reader only after the first visit of his friends in Suffolk. He meets his friend Charles who deliberately identified himself as a child and lives only in his own world which is later openly confirmed by

Thelma: “‟It‟s alright, you can say it. He‟s completely mad‟” (McEwan 1992: 131). McEwan in this way contrasts the childish personality of Charles and Stephen‟s upcoming realization of adulthood. It is most visible in the event of climbing on a tree where Charles has built his nest: “[…] [Stephen] has to summon all his powers of concentration to keep from crashing to the ground. At the crucial moment he realizes that he cannot afford to be half conscious, half in the moment and half outside it […]” (Childs 2009: 67).

The final episode concerning Charles Darke takes place in the penultimate chapter of

The Child in Time when Stephen must help Thelma to transfer the Charles‟s body from the forest to the cottage after he commits suicide. The moment of Charles‟s death paradoxically results in an open debate between Stephen and Thelma and the reader together with Stephen finally discovers the whole truth: “‟He was running out of time. He

had to have this, he was pleading with me to make it happen for him, to let him be a little boy. And in the end, I agreed, I thought he should have it or he would go to pieces”

(McEwan 1992: 223). The final discussion of Thelma and Stephen reveals the significant role of Thelma in the novel–when she entitles what Stephen in fact knew, but until this time, was not able to fully realize: “‟[…] think back over the last year and all your unhappiness, all the floundering about, the catatonia, when right in front of you was – well, then you see the difference between saying a thing is true and knowing it to be so‟”

(McEwan 1992: 26).

The process of rehabilitation is finished by Stephen‟s coming back to Julie and the birth of their child. McEwan portrays the birth as a spiritual experience which forces the couple to physically cooperate. The reader perceives the final ninth chapter as an absolute peak of the narrative which definitively ends the last phase of Stephen‟s grief and marks his entrance back to the normal life. Only in the very last chapter McEwan allows his character

–Stephen and Julie– to accept the loss and talk about it openly:

“He was about to speak and looked up at her. She whispered, „She was a lovely

daughter, a lovely girl.‟ He nodded, stunned. It was then, three years late, that

they began to cry together at last for the lost, irreplaceable child who would

not grow older for them, whose characteristic look and movement could never

be dispelled by time. […] In the wild expansiveness of their sorrow they

undertook to heal everyone and everything […] but they would start with

themselves; and while they could never redeem the loss of their daughter, they

would love her through their new child, and never close their minds to the

possibility of her return” (McEwan 1992: 239).

The Child in Time marks: “a crucial moment in [McEwan‟s] career, since it enables him to bring his established qualities to bear upon wider concerns, especially the rendering of intensely individual and insular experience” (Head 2007: 70). As opposed to The Cement

Garden the author chooses to tell the story in the third person. The omniscient narrator enables him to widen the point of view and take notice of the socio-political aspects of the time. At the same time McEwan captures the inner thoughts of the main characters:

“[…] there‟s a movement in [his] more recent work toward a greater

articulation of thought, from extensive descriptions of settings and scene in the

earlier books toward a greater consciousness of characters‟ thought processes”

(Weich 2).

In The Child in Time McEwan uses primarily literary methods typical for the authors of the second half of the 20th century, but includes also several modernist techniques, and also a supernatural event which could be inspired by the literature of magic realism–when

Stephen experiences a twist in time and becomes a witness to the events which happened before he was born. All these approaches combine and contribute to a greater complexity of the work.

An example of the modernist approach can be seen in the structure of the novel. Apart from the usual division into chapters the reader can notice also the internal fragmentation of the narrative according to the flow of thoughts of the particular characters. It is most visible in Stephen‟s escapes from the unpleasant, formal and boring meetings of the government commission, when he recapitulates the events of his contemporary but also past life in great detail.

Lastly, I would like to mention the structure of “the novel [which] pointedly begins with the loss of one child and ends with the arrival of another. Its nine chapters echo the nine 35

months of gestation, the foetus‟s gradual development in some way corresponding to

Stephen‟s slow growth to maturation” (Childs 2009: 66). All nine chapters begin with a short prologue from a fictional text written by Charles Darke on the basis of the Prime

Minister‟s request. These passages sharply contrast with the texts of the actual chapters because they are written in an administrative, authoritative and manipulative style, which pretends to be on the side of a child but in fact it is a governmental order:

“The novel achieves a very effective interweaving of its private and public

themes, especially through the business of the „Authorized Childcare Handbook‟,

which draws in all of the principal characters, and which reveals the collision of

personal and political concerns” (Head 2007: 73).

Conclusion

As I have stated in the introduction, I have chosen these two books because I found them suitable for comparison and for demonstration of the author‟s writing development.

In the conclusion I would like to discuss three major topics, which appear in both works, but the author treats them differently according to his intentions. In the preceding chapters

I have mentioned different narrative techniques, structure of the works, characters and their development and I have paid most if my attention to the critical events typical for

McEwan‟s fiction. Now I would like to move to more general topics which I happened to call: the sense of place, the concept of time and childhood vs. adulthood.

First of all I would like to comment on the sense of place because I see one of the greatest differences there. Whereas The Child in Time has a firm geographical determination–the whole story takes place on concrete places: first of all in London, then in Suffolk, in the monastery in the Chilterns and also in North Downs in Kent– and these are just several instances; The Cement Garden lacks any geographical reference:

“Following the modernist tradition of Kafka and Beckett, also the narrative in

The Cement Garden is devoid of reference to place-names, fictional or real (we

are merely informed on one occasion that the mother had a distant relative in

Ireland, p. 23), books (apart from a trashy science-fiction novel), songs (except

„Greensleeves‟), films, TV programmes, brand-names, or any other familiar

features of contemporary consumer society, thus enhancing the novel‟s

qualities of timelessness and of mystery: as readers we perceive that the

narrator is withholding information (where do the children live?), but we do

not know why” (Williams 1993: 219).

The anonymity allows the reader to realize that a similar story can happen wherever in the world. At the same time, it shows the strict unbalanced division of big cities with suburbs, where socially unaccepted people live in dilapidated houses, and whose empty space predicts unhappy life. The name of the book gives a hint about this strategy – “cement garden” – is in fact an oxymoron which basically symbolizes the emptiness, greyness and wasteland of the setting. The narrator Jack only contributes to the overall bleakness and monotony of the novella: “The greyness of the prose, its almost total lack of imagery, and the absence of cultural and historical reference points all serve to heighten our perception of the drabness and emptiness of an existence seemingly outside time and society”

(Williams 1993: 220).

In The Cement Garden also the concept of time is neglected as Williams suggests. The reader receives only one piece of information concerning the time determination in the fourth chapter: “It was mid-July, only a week before summer holidays began, and it had been hot every day for six weeks” (McEwan 2006: 43). The timelessness of the narrative is also demonstrated by children‟s passivity and inability to organize their time and activities.

Inertia and numbness of the hot summer days also originate in McEwan‟s idea which made him to write the Cement Garden: “It has a definite genesis in one paragraph of my notes, at the doodling stage, where I suddenly has a whole novel unfold about a family living ‟like burrowing animals […] after mother dies the house seems to fall asleep” (qtd. in Childs

2009: 38).

The reader encounters the idea of hibernation also in the book itself, for the first time in the sixth chapter when Jack describes the situation after Mother‟s death: “The days were too long, it was too hot, the house seemed to have fallen asleep” (McEwan 2006, 71); and for the second time at the end of the book when Jack and Julie recapitulate the whole matter: 38

“‟It‟s funny,‟ Julie said, „I‟ve lost all sense of time. […] Everything seems still

and fixed and it makes me feel I‟m not frightened of anything.‟ I said, „Except

for the times I go down into the cellar I feel like I‟m asleep. Whole weeks go

by without me noticing, and if you asked me what happened three days ago I

wouldn‟t be able to tell you‟” (McEwan 2006: 134-5).

Contrary to The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, as the title suggests, uses time as a highly important element of the narrative. McEwan devotes much of his attention to the concept of time: he combines the information about time from the laws of new physics– which is mainly demonstrated in the conversations of Stephen and Thelma, the woman physicist; with the subjective perception of time inspired by Einstein‟s Theory of Relativity:

“McEwan had been interested in science since childhood and in the years before the publication of The Child in Time continued to read books on Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics and relativity theory” (Childs 2009: 68).

The entity of time is in fact one of the key motives in the book and the author often mentions the word „time‟. Not only in the story itself but also in the short prologues from the fictive Authorised Childcare Handbook: “Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with and that when it is time to leave for school, for Daddy to go to work, for

Mummy to attend her duties, then these changes are as incontestable as the tides”

(McEwan 1992: 24). It plays an important role in the story. In some moments the time slows down–for instance when Stephen comes back before the time of his birth or experiences the car accident. The whole process of Stephen‟s rehabilitation desperately needs time. Peter Childs confirms the importance of time in his critical book on Ian

McEwan:

“The Child in Time exemplifies how time is not a certainty, not a reality in the

world. Rather, as in Stephen‟s experience, it is a magical essence of life, an

explicable entity that allows Kate to grow and exist within her father, that

allows the ephemeral childhood of each person to continue existing

throughout life, that enables Stephen to encounter his mother‟s decision to let

him live. Time, then is an ambiguous and as difficult as life itself” (Childs 2009:

70).

The childhood and its border with adulthood is a third topic which is common to both books but is interpreted by McEwan rather differently: “Childhood, always central in

McEwan‟s fiction, is the main theme, but now no longer seen as an angle on a hard adult world from a child‟s perplexed and ambiguous point of view, but as an element in the ambiguous world of contemporary family life” (Childs 2009: 60). In The Cement Garden the reader gets an image of children who are forced by consequences to become adults but are not prepared for the change yet. They lose their innocence too abruptly and are stigmatised by the experience they gain for the rest of their lives (Reynolds, Noakes 2002:

51).

In The Child in Time Stephen is forced to look inwards and find the „ephemeral childhood‟ which is hidden deep in his soul to be able to take part in his life more fully. In fact the loss of his little daughter is according to some critics just a symbol of a child

Stephen has lost within himself: “He was partly somewhere else, never quite paying attention, never wholly serious” (p. 105) (Childs 2009: 65). Charles Darke also represents the reverse process in comparison with The Cement Garden. He longs to be a child but pretends he is an adult and this crucial life paradox in the end makes him to commit suicide.

McEwan explains the idea of childhood and adulthood border and of the inner child most

explicitly through the character of Charles, for instance in the discussion of Stephen‟s book

Lemonade:

“„Now you say Lemonade wasn‟t written for children, and I believe you, Stephen.

Like all good writers, you wrote it for yourself. And this is my point. It was

your ten-year-old self you addressed. […] Lemonade is a message from you to a

previous self which will never cease to exist. And the message is bitter. That is

what makes it such a disturbing book to read. […] You‟ve spoken directly to

children. Whether you wanted to or not you‟ve communicated with them

across the abyss that separated the child from the adult and you‟ve given them

the first, ghostly intimation of their mortality. Reading you, they get wind of

the idea that they are finite as children‟” (McEwan 1992: 31).

The three topics I have just described in the conclusion created a perfect ground for

McEwan‟s strategy of inclusion of several significant critical events into his narrative.

The distinct strategy helps McEwan to emphasize the critical moments and appeal to the reader. The concrete information vacuum in The Cement Garden enables him to prefer the story and fully concentrate on it. On the contrary, the accurate factual determination of

The Child in Time enables him to deeply analyze the characters and apart from that, to deal with the characterization of the society and its development, to comment critically on politics, cultural life, educational system, new discoveries and even to tackle some philosophical questions. The shift from simplicity to complexity is thus one of the most important differences between McEwan‟s former and latter literary production:

“The degree to which we feel that barrier to be crossed in the short stories–

and whether or not we agree with [Walter] Evans that they are „unrelentingly

moral‟–will determine the extent to which the stories foreshadow the

achievements of his mature fiction, where the personal and the social interact

in rich and surprising ways” (Head 2007: 31).

The author‟s progress can be also demonstrated by the shift of undisclosed, almost abstract setting to the far more concrete determination of time and place. Ian McEwan himself recognised this explicit shift in an interview with Dave Weich:

“At the same time, I became interested in describing the flow of thought, but

also I became more interested in history and time and recognizable communal

places, whereas in my first two novels I thought I would never stoop to

naming a place, I would never stoop to naming a time–my novels were going

to hang in a free, ethereal realm” (Weich 2).

Works Cited

Primary Sources:

Mc Ewan, Ian. The Cement Garden. London: Vintage, 2006. Print.

_ _ _, The Child in Time. London: Vintage, 1992. Print.

Secondary Sources:

Bowlby, John. The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. London: Routledge

Classics, 2005. Print.

Childs, Peter, ed. The Fiction of Ian Mc Ewan (A Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism).

Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Groes, Sebastian, ed. Ian Mc Ewan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.

London: Continuum, 2009. Print.

Head, Dominic. Contemporary British Novelists: Ian Mc Ewan.

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Resume

My Bachelor Diploma Thesis deals with critical events in two chosen novels by Ian

McEwan–The Child in Time and The Cement Garden. The thesis focuses on depiction, description and analysis of the most important critical events with support of the secondary literature; and on the way these events are subsequently developed by the author.

I have tried to capture McEwan‟s narrative technique, which uses the critical moments as a basic strategy of developing the plot. My aim was also to depict the differences in development of the characters before and after experiencing a critical event. At the same time, I have tried to comment on the influence of the narrative mode on the novels, and to capture the most important features concerning the structure of the works.

In the conclusion I compared the time and place determination of the two novels and a distinct approach to the topic of childhood and adulthood. In addition, I have tried to determine the rate of the author‟s progress and define the areas of the biggest shift. I hope that my thesis will contribute with at least several interesting insights to the topic of comparative literary analysis.

Resumé

Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá rozborem kritických událostí ve dvou vybraných románech Iana McEwana – Dítě v čase a Betonová zahrada. Práce je zaměřena na vymezení, popsání a rozebrání těch nejdůležitějších kritických událostí za podpory sekundární literatury a na popis jejich následného využití autorem. Snažila jsem se vystihnout McEwanovu vyprávěcí techniku, která využívá kritických momentů jako základního prostředku pro posun děje. Mým cílem bylo rovněž zachytit rozdíl ve vývoji postav před a po prožití kritické události. Zároveň jsem se snažila komentovat vliv použitého modelu vypravěče na tato díla a vystihnout nejdůležitější znaky týkající se struktury obou knih.

V závěru jsem porovnala určení času, prostředí obou novel a rozdílné pojetí tématu dětství a dospělosti. Dále jsem se pokusila stanovit míru autorského posunu a vymezila oblasti, ve kterých k němu došlo. Doufám, že moje práce přinese alespoň několik zajímavých náhledů do tematiky literární komparatistiky.