Black Dogs [Large Print, Import] [Hardcover]

Ian McEwan (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Chivers Large print (Chivers, Windsor, Paragon & Camden); Large Print Ed edition (May 2003)
• ISBN-10: 0754089037
• ISBN-13: 978-0754089032
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author of short stories and novels for adults, as well as The Daydreamer, a children's novel illustrated by Anthony Browne. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His other award-winning novels are The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, and Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sublime, May 22, 2000

By 

Lisa Schweitzer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Dogs: A Novel (Paperback)

I loved this story: it stayed with me for days. The writing is enviably beautiful and rich; the theme is intelligent and challenging. Ostensibly, the debate between mysticism versus rationalism sunders Bernard and June. But each of the combatants possesses the worst traits of the other's ideology. Bernard has a slavish faith in the scientific method, while June feels the necessity to shore up her spirituality with flawless rhetoric and argumentation. They must both explain: and the irony is that their marriage ends, even though they are both talking about the same thing: the truth as they perceive it.

While this certainly isn't a new theme (postmodernism and its subsequent backlash has provided us with a lot of reading lately), McEwan handles it creatively and respectfully. He gives us no answers and never insults our intelligence.

Finally, McEwan brings up the question of evil and how we respond to it. In one situation, our narrator would turn away from it given his choice(when Bernard faces the mob, and the narrator doesn't); in another situation, the narrator confronts evil in another, bigger man and in himself.

It is a short, worthwhile, well-crafted read.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bull's eye, January 7, 2006

By 

RBradbury451 - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Black Dogs: A Novel (Paperback)

Set in post second world war Europe (mostly France) and extending to the late eighties, Ian McEwan's Black Dogs is the memoir of protagonist Jeremy, who diligently sets about to chronicle the lives of his in-laws, Bernard and June Tremaine. Jeremy was an orphan with a proclivity for insinuating himself into the families of his friends and, lately, his wife.

As we see in McEwan's Atonement, Black Dogs is also about the writing of a novel. Jeremy attempts to set the record straight about his in-laws, intellectuals on opposing surfaces of the same coin. June is a romantic, a mystic, who sees life as a journey through the inner space of reflective meditation and personal awareness. Her husband is an organizer, a thinker who feels the world can be set right only through the right application of right ideas. Since both June and Bernard would rather be right than happy, and since neither could see the conceit and limitations of their own viewpoints, they wasted a lifetime of love in separate but parallel existences.

The black dogs, the central allegorical feature of the novel, are either a fact, a historical event that evolved out of the depravity of humankind (dogs tend to be rather like their handlers), or they are more symbolic features, a mythological construction representing evil, manifest as personal depression and cultural depravity. Could they be both?

Could Bernard, the arcane intellectual who would rather spend hours talking about the plight of the poor than a half our in their company, could he be a courageous, understanding man after all? Where does love go, after it has filtered through a thousand grand but irrelevant arguments? How do we stumble upon who we are and how we got here?

McEwan is a delight to read. He has exceptional insight into human frailty and how it plays out in personal and national tragedy. His prose is razor sharp and his palette is rich and warm. The voices he gives his characters will remain with us.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brillaint observation of social decay, March 29, 2001

By 

ensiform (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Dogs: A Novel (Paperback)

The story of a young couple whose estrangement begins almost the day they're married, as told by the fascinated son-in-law, an orphan himself. An amazing novel, as universal as the fall of Communism and the memory of genocide and as introspective as one young woman's discovery of the mystical, of God, inside herself when she encounters some vicious dogs. As cosmic as the problem of pure evil and as ordinary as a bickering couple. Beautifully written, masterfully paced, and told with just the right amount of tension mixed with a soothing degree of acceptance. Each character is fully realized, and the dialogue perfect in its realism as well as its restraint. McEwan lets the characters reveal themselves, though their actions as well as actual descriptions of each other, and the subtleties, and potential misunderstandings, are complex and brilliant.