Uncanny Objects in The Cement Garden

I have been struggling to write a blog for Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden for well over a week now. The reason? The book provokingly disturbs me. It truly is "a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." (Freud, 1) A suburban house, in a sense, which uncannily grips, distorts and twists its readers' consciousness about the role of domestic space and objects.
These 'immovable objects' in their correct space impose a type of order in suburban life. At one point when exploring the domestic wasteland of "empty land where stinging nettles were growing around torn, corrugated tin" (McEwan, 22) that surrounded the home, Jack tells us that, "Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places and each object told you what to do--here you ate, here you slept, here you sat." (40) The problem in The Cement Garden is that these objects are moved to adapt when the children's mother becomes ill and eventually dies. The living-room table is brought upstairs to the mother's room, the bathroom chair goes down to the cellar next to 'grave,' and the baby's crib is reclaimed from the bowls of the cellar for Tom's return to infancy.
As the characters lives become more chaotic and less attached to their social roles as siblings and students, the objects and rooms become disassociated places. For example, "The kitchen was a place of stench and clouds of flies" (73) instead of the room where nourishment was maintained. As Jack, living in chaos, tells us, "the objects in the room seemed too dense, locked hard into the space they occupied and bulging with strain" (76) from their movement. There is a sense that the objects can not adapt, so the children must. So, as a result of their environment, Julie becomes the mother, Jack slowly becomes the father, Sue the discontented teenager and Tom becomes the infant.
Order is returned, but it is uncanny. The house is cleaned, the food prepared and Jack himself takes a bath and stops masturbating. Yet, there is something unfamiliar and strange lurking beneath the surface of these familiar scenes of suburbia: family secrets, the cellar, the body. As containment in the home bursts, as the secrets from the cellar are opened by an outsider, Derek, I was stunned into a state of disassociation. I felt as if I was just an object within a game of rules and guidelines hoping it was just a dream. I hoped that the female voice was ironically right when she said, "wasn't that a lovely sleep?" (138) Even thought The Cement Garden is Fiction, a type of dream, I can not dismiss the fact it awakened a feeling of consciousness I am not entirely sure how to deal with.