Privacy is one of the imaginative poles of a story [The Cement Garden] whose ambiguities tease and fascinate me the more I reflect on it. McEwan's imagination moves between extremes of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, and he offers a series of charged phrases, images and atmospheres which give his story a mythic direction. Both domestic privacy and its opposite—society—are present in the young narrator's observation "I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community of work." They are present again in his father's wish to build "a high wall round his special world" in order to shield his garden from an urban landscape of demolished houses and "vacant sites … lush with weeds and their flowers." Some of the images have an extraordinary power: the derelict cement garden, the gardens of the abandoned prefabs, the fine black dust that blows "from the direction of the tower...