Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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I really enjoyed the writing in the last section of this novel, the account of Bernard and June’s travels around postwar France and June’s encounter with the black dogs.

As their surname suggests, the story is a three-hander, trifurcating between Jeremy and his wife’s parents, or between rationalism, mysticism and the narrator’s argument that ‘it’s not in the business of the spirit to measure the world’. But the tripping that happens in this novel takes us through different countries and time - England, Berlin, France. McEwan is concerned in this book with the hold that time past has over time present, and the consequences that a loss of innocence can have on a family's emotional ties. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encounter forty years earlier - a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time.Very disappointing, and yet not a dreadful book either (I've read five other McEwan's, all 4* or 5*). For me, the most effective passages were those that looked at how people twist or ignore the truth to maintain their faith in something, and the tensions between scientific rationalism and more instinctive spiritual aspects. I can't remember why but I went through a phase of being rather interested in him as a teenager, where I discovered this fact, and many others, like how he always had to stand away from the edge of train platforms, for he didn't trust himself enough and was worried he would jump in front of one.

In this highly praised national bestseller, Ian McEwan has written his most humane and compelling novel to date. 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. Forty years on, their son-in-law is trying to uncover the cause of their estrangement and is led back to this moment on honeymoon and an experience of such darkness it was to wrench the couple apart. Placing the exploration of his in-laws' complicated relationship over five decades at the story's core around which the philosophical, spiritual and moral themes are continually gyrating, McEwan masterfully dissects the private sphere within and against the context of political developments in post-war Europe. In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani stated that "McEwan dexterously opens out his story onto a political and philosophical level" but skates briskly over these larger implications of the story after doing so.For over a decade, perfectly intelligent readers have been blinkered to the Weldon-Winterson-Brookner axis or the Amis-Boyd-McEwan one, each sex contemptuous of and deliberately ignorant about the fiction of the other. He seems to take a single kernel of a good idea, and fill in a story around it, adding characters and descriptions of histories and motivations, but all of it feels like mere scaffolding for the central event. I'm also constantly amazed that Ian McEwan is a widely respected, 'serious' author who very often ends his stories with twists or major revelations which make us reconsider what comes before.