The audio clip at the beginning of this song - a gem from the last gasp of Madonna’s relevance as a pop star - comes from the film adaptation of The Cement Garden. I have not watched it. I suppose this is one of those books where I don’t want the actors from the movie invading my headspace.
I was interested in the sledgehammer scene right before the lotion scene. Jack smashing the cement path that was the site of his father's death seems at first like an expression of anger at him. But thinking about it, he was right that there wasn't any use for it anymore. Why not smash it? If you're going to smash something--and smashing things is certainly fun--that seems like the most productive thing to do, rather than smashing something of actual value.
Then Julie says mother wants him to stop, but again he's right (I assume) that she'd been outside and couldn't have heard it from mother. It's an instance of Julie taking control of the family and making her own rules, then asking about the lotion to change the subject. Mother hasn't dies yet, but Julie is already foreseeing it and wants to establish herself as an authority figure. I don't meant to make that sound like she's power hungry, just that she wants to create order.
Felt bad for the kids when reading these chapters. So organized around their parents' excessiveness -- behave yourself at a birthday party or else dad will flip, dance and sing and do cartwheels as mom dies next to the cake. Etc.
On top of that is the unearned nostalgia of the widow -- your father would be so proud, your father would talk to you about becoming a man, etc.
Those kind of background concerns -- essentially "do this weird thing or else mom/dad will do something scary" -- can mutate into manipulativeness. Julie's, e.g. "Mom would want you do that." At this point you're so programmed to do stuff to keep mom and dad at bay, you just kind of roll w/ it, accept it w/o substantiation.
I didn't think of Jack sticking up for his bro, or the feminist broadside as heavy-handed. I sort of liked the latter, in particular, as the kind of performance that otherwise reticent teenager would be happy to engage in, with the bonus points for antagonizing your gross brother. But I did find the sledgehammer maybe a little over the top. Let me go violently destroy the place where I live.
I'd like to discuss Jack's dream at the beginning of chapter 3, in which he is followed by an unseen person who wants to show him something horrible in a wooden box. I'm not usually a fan of dreams as a narrative device (especially the pages long kind found in some fantasy novels), but when done well they can be a brief aside that gives insight into what's going on in a character's head on an unconscious level.
Jack is aware that he's dreaming, and knows that he can snap out of it at anytime. This makes me wonder if he's deriving some perverse enjoyment out of his nightmare, at least before it gets really frightening. By the end he is trying to scream to wake himself up but can't muster the sounds. I think dreams about being followed are fairly common and speak to some deep, primal fears involving predators and prey. Is the trauma in Jack's life creating a sense of foreboding, that something horrible is coming on the horizon? Or is this him feeling disgust at what he is becoming? "I knew there was a small creature inside, kept captive against its will and stinking horribly." Sounds... familiar. He wakes right before the box opens so we'll never know what it is he finds so repulsive.
I don't know if this dream is meant to symbolize or foreshadow anything, and maybe it's hackneyed for characters dreams to have important symbolic meaning, but the passage really struck me. McEwan nails the suffocating feeling of a nightmare in its climax: "No sound left my throat, and I could not even move my lips. The lid of the box was being lifted again. I could not turn and run for I had been running all night and now I had no choice but to look inside." I'm curious if anyone else read this passage 2 or 3 times like I did. I'll be interested to revisit it as I read further in the novel.
By the way, I'm enjoying this book quite a bit. I've been in a reading slump lately and haven't finished the last three novels I started. I had no idea what I was stepping into with this book and it's quite a bit different from the stuff I typically read so thank you for that. The weekly essay and discussion really make it that much better as well.
I wondered about the sci-fi novel too. I guess I saw it as a counterpoint to Jack's life: clean and polished where real life was filthy, purposeful where life was aimless, possessed of the absolute moral clarity of good guys vs. a monster where his life, like you said, is full of sins but no real villains. And wasn't there a chapter in the sci-fi novel where the heroes flee from a barren planet? Wish fulfillment.
But if that's it, it IS discordant. The rest of the novel doesn't give on the nose parables like that. So I think I'm wrong, and there's something else there.
These chapters were tough to read. I have a young son, and some illness or tragedy taking me from him early is one of my worst nightmares. I ached for Tom, in particular, but of course all of the children are young to lose both parents.
I didn’t read the mom as being in denial. My interpretation was that she knew she was dying but intentionally withheld the information from Jack, Sue, and Tom. This is because 1) She was “done with doctors” so I don’t believe she ever intended to go to the hospital. If we rule that out, her preparations for going away (setting up the money, talking to Jack) can only be for death. and 2) Julie tells Jack that the mom was dying but didn’t want “you lot” to know, implying the mother talked more openly with Julie.
I was upsetting that when the mom talks to Jack about “going away” for a while--the last conversation we see between them--her focus is on the damn house. They must keep the house clean so the kids don’t end up in state care. Why is state care bad? Because if the house is vacant, people might smash it up and steal things. She just has no ability to give the kids what they need emotionally or to prepare them for taking care of each other.
I blame her in the sense that I think some of her avoidance is conscious, but I also see her as weak and unable to face hard conversations with her kids. She probably rationalizes that she's protecting them, but really it's because she can't bear to tell them the truth. (in my reading where she knows she is dying)
It seems like it’s common for parents to hide illness from their kids. My grandmother didn’t tell my mom she was very sick until she was close to death. My aunt recently withheld a diagnosis from her adult son for a couple of months (but did tell him eventually). There’s probably an impulse to shelter them as long as possible, because once you tell them, nothing can make it okay. Like Freddie said, the reality facing these kids is unthinkable. So while I hope I'd make better choices and be strong for my son, I can sympathize with her limited ability to deal with it.
The event that stood out most to me was the mother’s death. I didn’t see it coming. I was reading her laying around in bed and mentions of meds needing picked up from the pharmacist as a deep depression or a grief that has left her unable to function as a mother. I figured she would just become a non-entity to the kids as the story moved on. It was quite the transition for me to go from her talking about being tired of laying around in bed to “Three days later she was dead.”
The other event that stood out to me was about Tom and his interest in being a girl. While I was reading that I couldn’t help but to think if I should be wondering if Tom is trans and how this might affect the story quickly followed by the thought that I were to have read this 10-20 years ago I’d not even entertained that thought and simply chalked it up to a normal infatuation with the other gender that kids of that age may exhibit. I’d of paid more attention to Jack’s protesting of the idea and wondered if he found it threatening to any idea of manhood he had.
Commander Hunt sounds a like a man who wouldn’t stop sludge hammering a sidewalk if his sister told him. Nor, would he put up with having his little brother dressed in a girl’s frock. Commander Hunt has serious business to attend to of ridding the Earth to Mars travel lanes of a space monster and it’s corpse. Sounds to me like it would come across as purposeful manly stuff to accomplish to a directionless 15 year old boy that lacks any male role model in his life.
I have unfortunately been witness to the dissolution of a family, a chain of events started by a death. Six years ago my mother in law died. I was there with my husband, his father and his younger brother. My husband's older brother chose not to be there.
Even though my husband and his brothers were adults at the time, they'd all been through it before 20 years earlier when she'd had stage 3 breast cancer the first time. I can't know what they were like beforehand, but the lasting impact of a profoundly ill parent is difficult to overstate. His father also became profoundly ill and had quadruple bypass. In a grim repetition, 20 years later he had bypass surgery again.
Even with the knowledge of everything that has come before, there is no plan by his dad. A mentally ill and dependent son's life is also enmeshed in his own, yet all the energy they can muster is to hang on, going through the daily motions of basic survival.
Reading these chapters made me profoundly sad. The directionless life of the family, the weak and failing parents. It all hits close, and I can only be grateful it all didn't fall apart when my husband was a child.
I found the description of the sci-fi novel striking, too. My first thought on reading was that it's an escape that's not really an escape - it's a fantastical plot, but it is, like everything else in the book, ultimately about something unnatural and grotesque that is mutating and dying, and whose death does not actually solve the problem of its existence.
My other thought was that the description of the mysterious rays creating a mutated monster that continues to mutate even in death was a way of communicating how Jack, living in a mix of genuine and willful ignorance about his mother's illness, subconsciously thinks of her wasting disease. Sounded a bit to me like a fanciful description of metastatic cancer. Though that might be just way too obvious.
Although, often even when something is obvious, or seems obvious in comparison to the subtlety of much of the book, I find myself swept up in it anyway because it's carried on the current of how good McEwan is at writing adolescence. Getting completely lost (to the point of hyperfixation) on a piece of dumb fiction that unexplainably resonates with me is something I remember well from my own adolescence. Julie's manipulations, too, are achingly real. I found her sudden speech about "what it feels like, for a girl" clunky; but I found her asking Jack to put on her suntan lotion to be true to what I remember of adolescent girlhood. People pay attention to your body when you're a teenage girl, even if you're not some striking beauty like Julie. I remember, as a teenager, letting men very close to me whose interest I wasn't actually soliciting, whose interest I even might have rejected on an intellectual level--and I couldn't have told you at the time where the border lay between my sense of vague obligation not to say "no," and my feeling that this was a kind of power I would be foolish to abdicate. As a teenager, you test the limits of your ability to manipulate. I think McEwan draws that struggle in Julie with brutal truthfulness, and without making the mistake of blaming her for it (or even treating it as unambiguously blameworthy).
I'm loving this book, and like others here have said it's very different from what I gravitate toward. I got a paid subscription to get in on the book club and I'm glad I did.
This book is truly baffling. I am amazed that it is so deeply felt and realistic, and yet I can hear a parody-like reading of it too. Maybe I tend to think too much in terms of other books I've read, but there really is a Lolita-like quality to it, in the way that it can seem to be daring you to go along with its outrageousness. Isn't some of it almost like totally deranged teenage wish-fulfillment? Jack can sometimes seem like a grotesque parody of a teenage boy, walking around with his phallic sledgehammer or tickling his sister until he pees himself.
There is a wild energy underneath all of it, a real hidden chaos. I feel like it could tell me anything in that disarming deadpan narration and I'd go along with it.
I found myself very moved by the children's mother and her fading vitality. Like you said about the father, she was in the story to die - a shadow to be cast over the children for the rest of the book - but in life she was the embodiment of the malaise that hangs heavy over this story.
She has an idea of her role as a mother and clearly takes some real pleasure in being around and hearing about the accomplishments of her children. But it's kabuki - she does her best to go through the motions, but the substance and vitality isn't there. She tries to instill virtue as she understands it - you lose two pints of blood for doing that, you know - but never hits the mark. She tells her son that his father would have been proud of him, but only out of a sense that fathers should be proud of their children. Outwardly she hopes for that brighter day when she'll be out of bed and able to do all those things that need to be done, but on some level she understands that it won't happen.
But even before becoming bedridden, nothing she does is quite enough. She's never able to keep up with the constant demands of her life and children. She is Britain circa 1970 - the grey, dying nation whose children know no future. And she is the garden - the stunted plants and flowers that eventually get put out of their misery.
The sci-fi novel is a gift from Sue who, in these chapters, has rejected the game the three of them had been playing and instead devoted herself to spending time at the library - so removing herself from the wider game of playground sexuality - and for pleasure is reading books about girls at boarding schools, presumably stories with no boys in them. The girls get into 'adventures', like finding hidden treasure and solving mysteries, not teen romance.
Julie has given him a metal comb and nail scissors - an invitation to join her world of suntanning and adult concern over their appearances. Sue's gift of the novel could be an alternative invitation, to become an adult like the book's protagonist, Commander Hunt. The name is perfect. Commander means he's take-charge, and a hunt is the prototypical job of the male provider. Contrast it with Jack's failure to even look for work, despite having been asked by his mother.
At first he tries to be Commander Hunt by listening to Julie. He goes to the bathroom and spends time looking nice. Then we get the playground confrontation. The kid being red-headed (the meanest sort) is a kind of sci-fi logic: vulcans have pointy ears and are logical, klingons have ridged foreheads and are warlike. When he says that he crossed the playground at great speed prior to seizing the bully, I wondered how much it was a parallel to Commander Hunt flying in his spaceship to intercept the monster. Of course, unlike Hunt, he only destroyed the beast; he didn't have a scientist to explain to him that it was important to dispose of the carcass as well to prevent the monstrous mutation which, in the real world, lead to Tom getting beaten up anyway.
The dream of the cigar box (which aren't always just a cigars) might be a dream version of a coffin, symbolising his father's death. At first it's filled with the promise of sophisticated masculinity (his father smoked a pipe, a cheaper alternative) but soon the dream changes to there being something nasty and ill smelling in the box - just like his room. The actual masculinity he is growing into isn't living up to his or his sister's expectations. And it's bad enough that Tom has given up on being male altogether, deciding that he wants to be a girl instead.
>>>Having your brother rub suntan lotion on you is not anything inherently nefarious, but ... seems rather manipulative. This is especially true given that it would be impossible for Julie to miss Jack’s infatuation with her. I am not accusing her of deliberately and consciously stoking sexual arousal in Jack to further her own selfish ends. But I do think Julie has an unconscious sense of her ability to influence the men around her with physical desire...<<<
Personally I found the anvil-obvious manipulation with the sunscreen to be a more striking false note than the random gender inequality speech. It seemed too deliberate to me. I don't think it's "impossible" at all that she doesn't know the extent of her brother's creepy obsession with her. Given her more developed understanding of social dynamics as evidenced by her ability to navigate school popularity and understand the parents' behaviors more than her siblings do, I'm sure she knows she has sway over Jack that gives her some power, but there's been zero text to suggest to me (so far, at least) that she "has an unconscious sense of her ability to influence the men around her with physical desire" other than the fact that *Jack may believe this and has suggested as such* ("...she had the quiet strength and detachment and lived in the separate world of those who are, and secretly know they are, exceptionally beautiful," and "...she dominated her group and heightened her reputation with a disruptive, intimidating quietness.")
It's possible that this particular aspect is just pushing my cranky-feminist buttons (that are undoubtedly wired directly to how frightened and uncomfortable I usually felt at that age -- I didn't have any sense of power unless by "power" you mean "fun ability to make large unfamiliar men in trucks honk and yell stuff when they drive by"). But the whole "aloof female character of similar age drives confused and kind of dumb teenage boy to distraction" trope is one I often find irksome. I'm having a lot of trouble trusting anything about Julie as a character because so far it feels like she's there just to give Jack an object of lust and an opponent in a power struggle now that his father is gone. She's utterly central to Jack's sexual preoccupation, but she's not really human to him (and by extension us) -- unlike Sue, who gets to be something more (though he couches it almost as something less). "I did not really think of Sue as a girl now. She was, unlike Julie, merely a sister, a person." At the same time, Jack's reactions to and descriptions of Julie are very convincing. Spending time in the mind of this disturbed and fairly obtuse adolescent boy is so unpleasant because it feels authentic and grounded in his particular reality.
So while I totally buy Julie's aloofness and avoidance being *interpreted by Jack* as confidence based on inner knowledge of her own power (it's a trope for a reason), I believe Julie's own explanation is more accurate: "...she would protest, her voice musical with bemusement, that she was the one who was afraid. It was true, she was shy—there was a rumor she never spoke in class without blushing..." As someone else mentioned, I see her as trying to regain her sense of power after the tickling incident, and with that -- somewhat counterintuitively -- safety, in asking him to rub the lotion, but I don't totally accept her being expressly manipulative. I'd interpret that as desperate distraction driven mostly by fear. She's the oldest child in a dysfunctional, erratic household, so I think it's understandable that she would have a deep-seated need to keep an upper hand and maintain (relative) equilibrium, as well as the well-developed instincts to do so. I'm not convinced it goes beyond that (so far).
As others have mentioned, I'm really enjoying reading a book I never would have picked up on my own. And the commentary is fun to read and brings up details and nuance I'd miss on my own! Thanks, everyone <3
I was interested in the sledgehammer scene right before the lotion scene. Jack smashing the cement path that was the site of his father's death seems at first like an expression of anger at him. But thinking about it, he was right that there wasn't any use for it anymore. Why not smash it? If you're going to smash something--and smashing things is certainly fun--that seems like the most productive thing to do, rather than smashing something of actual value.
Then Julie says mother wants him to stop, but again he's right (I assume) that she'd been outside and couldn't have heard it from mother. It's an instance of Julie taking control of the family and making her own rules, then asking about the lotion to change the subject. Mother hasn't dies yet, but Julie is already foreseeing it and wants to establish herself as an authority figure. I don't meant to make that sound like she's power hungry, just that she wants to create order.
Felt bad for the kids when reading these chapters. So organized around their parents' excessiveness -- behave yourself at a birthday party or else dad will flip, dance and sing and do cartwheels as mom dies next to the cake. Etc.
On top of that is the unearned nostalgia of the widow -- your father would be so proud, your father would talk to you about becoming a man, etc.
Those kind of background concerns -- essentially "do this weird thing or else mom/dad will do something scary" -- can mutate into manipulativeness. Julie's, e.g. "Mom would want you do that." At this point you're so programmed to do stuff to keep mom and dad at bay, you just kind of roll w/ it, accept it w/o substantiation.
I didn't think of Jack sticking up for his bro, or the feminist broadside as heavy-handed. I sort of liked the latter, in particular, as the kind of performance that otherwise reticent teenager would be happy to engage in, with the bonus points for antagonizing your gross brother. But I did find the sledgehammer maybe a little over the top. Let me go violently destroy the place where I live.
I'd like to discuss Jack's dream at the beginning of chapter 3, in which he is followed by an unseen person who wants to show him something horrible in a wooden box. I'm not usually a fan of dreams as a narrative device (especially the pages long kind found in some fantasy novels), but when done well they can be a brief aside that gives insight into what's going on in a character's head on an unconscious level.
Jack is aware that he's dreaming, and knows that he can snap out of it at anytime. This makes me wonder if he's deriving some perverse enjoyment out of his nightmare, at least before it gets really frightening. By the end he is trying to scream to wake himself up but can't muster the sounds. I think dreams about being followed are fairly common and speak to some deep, primal fears involving predators and prey. Is the trauma in Jack's life creating a sense of foreboding, that something horrible is coming on the horizon? Or is this him feeling disgust at what he is becoming? "I knew there was a small creature inside, kept captive against its will and stinking horribly." Sounds... familiar. He wakes right before the box opens so we'll never know what it is he finds so repulsive.
I don't know if this dream is meant to symbolize or foreshadow anything, and maybe it's hackneyed for characters dreams to have important symbolic meaning, but the passage really struck me. McEwan nails the suffocating feeling of a nightmare in its climax: "No sound left my throat, and I could not even move my lips. The lid of the box was being lifted again. I could not turn and run for I had been running all night and now I had no choice but to look inside." I'm curious if anyone else read this passage 2 or 3 times like I did. I'll be interested to revisit it as I read further in the novel.
By the way, I'm enjoying this book quite a bit. I've been in a reading slump lately and haven't finished the last three novels I started. I had no idea what I was stepping into with this book and it's quite a bit different from the stuff I typically read so thank you for that. The weekly essay and discussion really make it that much better as well.
I wondered about the sci-fi novel too. I guess I saw it as a counterpoint to Jack's life: clean and polished where real life was filthy, purposeful where life was aimless, possessed of the absolute moral clarity of good guys vs. a monster where his life, like you said, is full of sins but no real villains. And wasn't there a chapter in the sci-fi novel where the heroes flee from a barren planet? Wish fulfillment.
But if that's it, it IS discordant. The rest of the novel doesn't give on the nose parables like that. So I think I'm wrong, and there's something else there.
These chapters were tough to read. I have a young son, and some illness or tragedy taking me from him early is one of my worst nightmares. I ached for Tom, in particular, but of course all of the children are young to lose both parents.
I didn’t read the mom as being in denial. My interpretation was that she knew she was dying but intentionally withheld the information from Jack, Sue, and Tom. This is because 1) She was “done with doctors” so I don’t believe she ever intended to go to the hospital. If we rule that out, her preparations for going away (setting up the money, talking to Jack) can only be for death. and 2) Julie tells Jack that the mom was dying but didn’t want “you lot” to know, implying the mother talked more openly with Julie.
I was upsetting that when the mom talks to Jack about “going away” for a while--the last conversation we see between them--her focus is on the damn house. They must keep the house clean so the kids don’t end up in state care. Why is state care bad? Because if the house is vacant, people might smash it up and steal things. She just has no ability to give the kids what they need emotionally or to prepare them for taking care of each other.
I blame her in the sense that I think some of her avoidance is conscious, but I also see her as weak and unable to face hard conversations with her kids. She probably rationalizes that she's protecting them, but really it's because she can't bear to tell them the truth. (in my reading where she knows she is dying)
It seems like it’s common for parents to hide illness from their kids. My grandmother didn’t tell my mom she was very sick until she was close to death. My aunt recently withheld a diagnosis from her adult son for a couple of months (but did tell him eventually). There’s probably an impulse to shelter them as long as possible, because once you tell them, nothing can make it okay. Like Freddie said, the reality facing these kids is unthinkable. So while I hope I'd make better choices and be strong for my son, I can sympathize with her limited ability to deal with it.
The event that stood out most to me was the mother’s death. I didn’t see it coming. I was reading her laying around in bed and mentions of meds needing picked up from the pharmacist as a deep depression or a grief that has left her unable to function as a mother. I figured she would just become a non-entity to the kids as the story moved on. It was quite the transition for me to go from her talking about being tired of laying around in bed to “Three days later she was dead.”
The other event that stood out to me was about Tom and his interest in being a girl. While I was reading that I couldn’t help but to think if I should be wondering if Tom is trans and how this might affect the story quickly followed by the thought that I were to have read this 10-20 years ago I’d not even entertained that thought and simply chalked it up to a normal infatuation with the other gender that kids of that age may exhibit. I’d of paid more attention to Jack’s protesting of the idea and wondered if he found it threatening to any idea of manhood he had.
Commander Hunt sounds a like a man who wouldn’t stop sludge hammering a sidewalk if his sister told him. Nor, would he put up with having his little brother dressed in a girl’s frock. Commander Hunt has serious business to attend to of ridding the Earth to Mars travel lanes of a space monster and it’s corpse. Sounds to me like it would come across as purposeful manly stuff to accomplish to a directionless 15 year old boy that lacks any male role model in his life.
I have unfortunately been witness to the dissolution of a family, a chain of events started by a death. Six years ago my mother in law died. I was there with my husband, his father and his younger brother. My husband's older brother chose not to be there.
Even though my husband and his brothers were adults at the time, they'd all been through it before 20 years earlier when she'd had stage 3 breast cancer the first time. I can't know what they were like beforehand, but the lasting impact of a profoundly ill parent is difficult to overstate. His father also became profoundly ill and had quadruple bypass. In a grim repetition, 20 years later he had bypass surgery again.
Even with the knowledge of everything that has come before, there is no plan by his dad. A mentally ill and dependent son's life is also enmeshed in his own, yet all the energy they can muster is to hang on, going through the daily motions of basic survival.
Reading these chapters made me profoundly sad. The directionless life of the family, the weak and failing parents. It all hits close, and I can only be grateful it all didn't fall apart when my husband was a child.
I found the description of the sci-fi novel striking, too. My first thought on reading was that it's an escape that's not really an escape - it's a fantastical plot, but it is, like everything else in the book, ultimately about something unnatural and grotesque that is mutating and dying, and whose death does not actually solve the problem of its existence.
My other thought was that the description of the mysterious rays creating a mutated monster that continues to mutate even in death was a way of communicating how Jack, living in a mix of genuine and willful ignorance about his mother's illness, subconsciously thinks of her wasting disease. Sounded a bit to me like a fanciful description of metastatic cancer. Though that might be just way too obvious.
Although, often even when something is obvious, or seems obvious in comparison to the subtlety of much of the book, I find myself swept up in it anyway because it's carried on the current of how good McEwan is at writing adolescence. Getting completely lost (to the point of hyperfixation) on a piece of dumb fiction that unexplainably resonates with me is something I remember well from my own adolescence. Julie's manipulations, too, are achingly real. I found her sudden speech about "what it feels like, for a girl" clunky; but I found her asking Jack to put on her suntan lotion to be true to what I remember of adolescent girlhood. People pay attention to your body when you're a teenage girl, even if you're not some striking beauty like Julie. I remember, as a teenager, letting men very close to me whose interest I wasn't actually soliciting, whose interest I even might have rejected on an intellectual level--and I couldn't have told you at the time where the border lay between my sense of vague obligation not to say "no," and my feeling that this was a kind of power I would be foolish to abdicate. As a teenager, you test the limits of your ability to manipulate. I think McEwan draws that struggle in Julie with brutal truthfulness, and without making the mistake of blaming her for it (or even treating it as unambiguously blameworthy).
I'm loving this book, and like others here have said it's very different from what I gravitate toward. I got a paid subscription to get in on the book club and I'm glad I did.
This book is truly baffling. I am amazed that it is so deeply felt and realistic, and yet I can hear a parody-like reading of it too. Maybe I tend to think too much in terms of other books I've read, but there really is a Lolita-like quality to it, in the way that it can seem to be daring you to go along with its outrageousness. Isn't some of it almost like totally deranged teenage wish-fulfillment? Jack can sometimes seem like a grotesque parody of a teenage boy, walking around with his phallic sledgehammer or tickling his sister until he pees himself.
There is a wild energy underneath all of it, a real hidden chaos. I feel like it could tell me anything in that disarming deadpan narration and I'd go along with it.
McEwan to agent: Maybe I could do Lord of the Flies in single-family house...
Agent to McEwan: Fantastic! Golding meets the Brady Bunch! I love it! It'll sell a million! Oh, and Ian, be sure to write some flies into it!
McEwan to agent: Got it, flies.
I found myself very moved by the children's mother and her fading vitality. Like you said about the father, she was in the story to die - a shadow to be cast over the children for the rest of the book - but in life she was the embodiment of the malaise that hangs heavy over this story.
She has an idea of her role as a mother and clearly takes some real pleasure in being around and hearing about the accomplishments of her children. But it's kabuki - she does her best to go through the motions, but the substance and vitality isn't there. She tries to instill virtue as she understands it - you lose two pints of blood for doing that, you know - but never hits the mark. She tells her son that his father would have been proud of him, but only out of a sense that fathers should be proud of their children. Outwardly she hopes for that brighter day when she'll be out of bed and able to do all those things that need to be done, but on some level she understands that it won't happen.
But even before becoming bedridden, nothing she does is quite enough. She's never able to keep up with the constant demands of her life and children. She is Britain circa 1970 - the grey, dying nation whose children know no future. And she is the garden - the stunted plants and flowers that eventually get put out of their misery.
The sci-fi novel is a gift from Sue who, in these chapters, has rejected the game the three of them had been playing and instead devoted herself to spending time at the library - so removing herself from the wider game of playground sexuality - and for pleasure is reading books about girls at boarding schools, presumably stories with no boys in them. The girls get into 'adventures', like finding hidden treasure and solving mysteries, not teen romance.
Julie has given him a metal comb and nail scissors - an invitation to join her world of suntanning and adult concern over their appearances. Sue's gift of the novel could be an alternative invitation, to become an adult like the book's protagonist, Commander Hunt. The name is perfect. Commander means he's take-charge, and a hunt is the prototypical job of the male provider. Contrast it with Jack's failure to even look for work, despite having been asked by his mother.
At first he tries to be Commander Hunt by listening to Julie. He goes to the bathroom and spends time looking nice. Then we get the playground confrontation. The kid being red-headed (the meanest sort) is a kind of sci-fi logic: vulcans have pointy ears and are logical, klingons have ridged foreheads and are warlike. When he says that he crossed the playground at great speed prior to seizing the bully, I wondered how much it was a parallel to Commander Hunt flying in his spaceship to intercept the monster. Of course, unlike Hunt, he only destroyed the beast; he didn't have a scientist to explain to him that it was important to dispose of the carcass as well to prevent the monstrous mutation which, in the real world, lead to Tom getting beaten up anyway.
The dream of the cigar box (which aren't always just a cigars) might be a dream version of a coffin, symbolising his father's death. At first it's filled with the promise of sophisticated masculinity (his father smoked a pipe, a cheaper alternative) but soon the dream changes to there being something nasty and ill smelling in the box - just like his room. The actual masculinity he is growing into isn't living up to his or his sister's expectations. And it's bad enough that Tom has given up on being male altogether, deciding that he wants to be a girl instead.
>>>Having your brother rub suntan lotion on you is not anything inherently nefarious, but ... seems rather manipulative. This is especially true given that it would be impossible for Julie to miss Jack’s infatuation with her. I am not accusing her of deliberately and consciously stoking sexual arousal in Jack to further her own selfish ends. But I do think Julie has an unconscious sense of her ability to influence the men around her with physical desire...<<<
Personally I found the anvil-obvious manipulation with the sunscreen to be a more striking false note than the random gender inequality speech. It seemed too deliberate to me. I don't think it's "impossible" at all that she doesn't know the extent of her brother's creepy obsession with her. Given her more developed understanding of social dynamics as evidenced by her ability to navigate school popularity and understand the parents' behaviors more than her siblings do, I'm sure she knows she has sway over Jack that gives her some power, but there's been zero text to suggest to me (so far, at least) that she "has an unconscious sense of her ability to influence the men around her with physical desire" other than the fact that *Jack may believe this and has suggested as such* ("...she had the quiet strength and detachment and lived in the separate world of those who are, and secretly know they are, exceptionally beautiful," and "...she dominated her group and heightened her reputation with a disruptive, intimidating quietness.")
It's possible that this particular aspect is just pushing my cranky-feminist buttons (that are undoubtedly wired directly to how frightened and uncomfortable I usually felt at that age -- I didn't have any sense of power unless by "power" you mean "fun ability to make large unfamiliar men in trucks honk and yell stuff when they drive by"). But the whole "aloof female character of similar age drives confused and kind of dumb teenage boy to distraction" trope is one I often find irksome. I'm having a lot of trouble trusting anything about Julie as a character because so far it feels like she's there just to give Jack an object of lust and an opponent in a power struggle now that his father is gone. She's utterly central to Jack's sexual preoccupation, but she's not really human to him (and by extension us) -- unlike Sue, who gets to be something more (though he couches it almost as something less). "I did not really think of Sue as a girl now. She was, unlike Julie, merely a sister, a person." At the same time, Jack's reactions to and descriptions of Julie are very convincing. Spending time in the mind of this disturbed and fairly obtuse adolescent boy is so unpleasant because it feels authentic and grounded in his particular reality.
So while I totally buy Julie's aloofness and avoidance being *interpreted by Jack* as confidence based on inner knowledge of her own power (it's a trope for a reason), I believe Julie's own explanation is more accurate: "...she would protest, her voice musical with bemusement, that she was the one who was afraid. It was true, she was shy—there was a rumor she never spoke in class without blushing..." As someone else mentioned, I see her as trying to regain her sense of power after the tickling incident, and with that -- somewhat counterintuitively -- safety, in asking him to rub the lotion, but I don't totally accept her being expressly manipulative. I'd interpret that as desperate distraction driven mostly by fear. She's the oldest child in a dysfunctional, erratic household, so I think it's understandable that she would have a deep-seated need to keep an upper hand and maintain (relative) equilibrium, as well as the well-developed instincts to do so. I'm not convinced it goes beyond that (so far).
As others have mentioned, I'm really enjoying reading a book I never would have picked up on my own. And the commentary is fun to read and brings up details and nuance I'd miss on my own! Thanks, everyone <3