Black Dogs
by Ian McEwan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ian McEwanEdition: Paperback
Audio: Spanish (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09
ISBN: 0099277085
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Vintage Books
Book Reviews of Black Dogs
Book Review: The Archaeology of Belief
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought I had read all Ian McEwan's novels, but had missed this one from 1992. It is short (161 pages), it reads more like a memoir than a novel, but it opens a window on a writer wrestling with ideas of real substance, with the empathy to sense how these affect the lives of real human beings, and the mastery of style to charm, challenge, or shock. This is a book of intellectual substance, but it is seductively easy to read and -- despite its grim title and cover -- probably the most positive McEwan has so far written.
"Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight," begins the narrator, Jeremy, "I have had my eye on other people's parents." His preface is a kind of thank-you note to the parents of friends who have welcomed him into their homes and taught him as he was growing up. But he soon concentrates on one couple, Bernard and June Tremaine, the parents of his wife Jenny. The book is essentially a portrait of their marriage -- or rather, of the reason why their marriage broke up at the end of their honeymoon, causing them to live apart in two separate countries (England and France) for most of their lives, even though they continued to be attracted to one another and produced three children. Theirs was a union of opposites: "Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest." Jeremy is an agnostic, yet this is a book about belief. He is primarily an observer, yet it is a book about political action. He was for many years a loner, yet in the end this is a book about love.
The moment when June and Bernard realized the differences in their beliefs came during their honeymoon in 1946, on a walking tour of the barren Cévennes mountains in the South of France. June's encounter with two black dogs in a rocky gorge is mentioned throughout the book, but it is only fully explained at the end. For her, it is a symbol of utter evil countered by mysterious good. Jeremy writes as an archaeological excavation to uncover the meaning of that epiphany. The facts are not in question; this is not a novel of plot and revelation. For Jeremy, it is a matter of refracting certain experiences in his life through June's prism, examining them with Bernard's more scientific lens, and comparing the two. He describes going with Bernard to Berlin as the Wall was coming down, a moment when celebration erupts into sudden violence. He describes a trip to the Majdanek camp shortly after he met Jenny, a visit that stuns him with his own reactions to the evil: "The extravagant numerical scale, the easy-to-say numbers -- tens and hundreds of thousands, millions -- denied the imagination its proper sympathies, its rightful grasp of the suffering, and one was drawn insidiously to the persecutors' premise, that life was cheap, junk to be inspected in heaps." He revisits the Cévennes, a harsh landscape but also a purifying one, and once again becomes embroiled in an apparently senseless act of violence. Every part of this book picks up themes from other parts, making one want to reread it immediately to admire the control behind its relaxed tone.
Perhaps because it was my last McEwan novel to read, I could not help seeing aspects of his other books reflected or foreshadowed here. There is the Berlin setting of THE INNOCENT, the mountain hiking of AMSTERDAM, the author shaping his subject as in ATONEMENT, the political awareness of SATURDAY, the couple who separate during their honeymoon as in ON CHESIL BEACH, and even a hint (in Bernard) of the protagonist of SOLAR. But the author who comes most to mind is WG Sebald, for his discovery of the power of a fictional memoir, as in AUSTERLITZ, and his patient archaeology of horror. But whereas Sebald incorporates grainy photographs to evoke the past, McEwan pulls even past events into an immediate present. His descriptions make photographs irrelevant; Google his locations in the Cévennes, for example, and you will find them exactly as his words had conjured them. And while horror certainly has a part in McEwan's world, the final quality to emerge from his archaeological dig is sheer unadulterated joy.
Summary of Black Dogs
"Black Dogs" is built around a brilliant short story, a memerically slow-motion encounter with two terrifying dogs by an English couple who are honeymooning just after the war in a French mountain village.Literature & Fiction Books
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