The events which take place in Ian McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden, are as apparently unnatural, though less gratuitously so, as in most of the stories in First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets. The ten tidy chapters are a chart of ugliness, death, rotting cadavers, incest and perversion. Most family taboos are briskly broken, but, on the part of the narrator at least, there is no relish. (p. 104)

It is the startling combination of everyday banality with the most horrendous acts that gives The Cement Garden its especial flavour.

As has been pointed out more than once, the plot bears a striking resemblance to that in a novel of the fifties by Julien Gloag—though McEwan claims not to have read it—and which was subsequently filmed, but the manner is rather different. The story is told in the first person by the elder...