Customer Reviews

Black Dogs

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Black Dogs contains massive amounts for such a slim volume. It is a stylish, elegant short novel that mixes in such a wealth of European culture, war, timescale, philosophy, ideology and character change that I couldn't quite believe the novel only amounts to some 160 pages.

Black Dogs is, unashamedly, a European novel of ideas. As Julian Barnes said, some people don't like finding ideas in novels, it is like discovering a toothpick in a sandwich (Nabokov was perhaps the most forthright proponent of this view). I happen to rather like ideas. Used wisely, they can infuse fiction with new angles, different approaches to the essential fictional subjects - stories, and the human condition that allows them to happen.

Despite the ambition though, I don't think the novel is one of McEwan's greatest. There is so much packed in that the main characters - Bernard and June, the couple on which the book is centred, don't have sufficient room to breathe. They come across more as paragons of particular ideas and personality types McEwan is interested in exploring - intellectual vs practical thinker, reason vs spirituality, subjective vs objective truth, scorpions v dragonflies (used in two separate, vivid scenes to show the difficulty of pinning down truth, and the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting).

Sometimes, in those sublime Proustian sentences McEwan is capable of crafting, the prose soars, such as the description of the fall of the Berlin wall: 'East Berliners in nylon anoraks and bleached-out jeans jackets, pushing buggies of holding their children's hands, were filing past Checkpoint Charlie, unchecked..Two sisters clung to each other and wouldn't be parted for an interview.' But too often the story is clogged by a little too much neat, earnest philosophizing, and not enough fictional passion.

Take the time to search for this book in the library or used book store. It's one you'll want to loan to friends or read again yourself. There is so much in just 160 pages. A relationship, a memoire, a narrator's connection to the people he is writing about... Plus, the countryside of France and top notch writing. What more could you want?

Ian McEwan proves once again in BLACK DOGS to be a master of literary understatement, a writer whose power (like that of fellow Brit Kazuo Ishiguro) derives from an ability to thread hints of mindless evil through even the most well-heeled, socially-ordered circumstances. In McEwan's modern world, newlyweds, happy families, and prosperous businessmen and professionals live, often blissfully unaware, on a cliff edge, always just a short step from a precipitous drop into loss or chaos. Even the most comfortable lives are far more fragile and more easily disrupted than those who live them ever imagine.

In BLACK DOGS, McEwan has trained his sights on the world-shattering events of the mid-20th Century, from World War II and the rise of fascism and communism to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He chooses as his narrator a young man named Jeremy, orphaned at an early age by an auto accident, raised by his older sister (herself trapped in a dysfunctional marriage), and bookishly educated in an English prep school. Inordinately attached to the parents of his school friends, Jeremy meets and marries Jenny Tremaine and becomes equally, if not more attached, to Jenny's free-spirited, socially and politically liberal parents, Bernard and June. It is Bernard and June who provide the core of this novel, their story unfolding on dual tracks through Jeremy and Bernard's attendance at the fall of the Berlin Wall and Jeremy's interviews with June as background for publication of her memoirs.

Throughout the novel, McEwan hints at a transformational event in June's life, something that occurred when she and Bernard were newlyweds hiking through south France. Because of this mysterious event, which took place near a dolmen, an ancient tomb or burial ground, June had abandoned communism for a form of religious mysticism, she and Bernard separated (but never divorced) for nearly their entire adult lives, and they bought a country home near the site of the life-changing incident. McEwan alludes repeatedly to black dogs and the story of the local village mayor, but it is not until the end that we learn the nature of the event itself. More significant, we learn the source of these ominous black dogs and their historical and metaphorical meanings. Only in the last third of the book does the true horror of those amorphous dogs come to light, and even then, McEwan leaves their meaning ambiguous - perhaps real, perhaps the lewd imaginings of a few country farmers. Similarly, June's transformation can be seen as realization of life's fragility or as a religious epiphany with echoes of the lightning that struck Saul in the New Testament and converted him to Paul the Apostle.

McEwan's message is inescapable. Whether we view life through a rational, scientific lens or a religious, mystical one, we must be on guard against the emergence of evil, whether modestly benign or umimaginably malevolent. The human potential for evil rests within everyone, and it lurks at the fringes of society, hidden from sight like black dogs roaming a sparsely-populated countryside, until we turn a corner and stare it face to face. How we respond (compare June's direct actions to Bernard's simultaneously intellectualized ponderings over a parade of caterpillars) says everything about who we are, how we influence the course of events around us, and how those events affect us (could Jenny's atrophied sixth finger be a byproduct of June's experience with pure evil at the dolmen?). BLACK DOGS masterfully contemplates the issues of good and evil and faith versus rationalism while leaving readers plenty of room to argue either side. The pacing is almost too controlled, but the resulting explosion of irrationality into an ordered world is all the more powerful for it.

Black Dogs is way too schematic for me. Bernard and June are Yin and Yang, material one and spiritual the other, but because they are both so unidimensional, not only can they not live with each other in marriage, they aren't all that interesting either, though if you've got to pick one, take June. Not much better is son-in-law Jeremy, their memoirist who faithfully transcribes their stories spanning five decades. And the dogs of the title, and the harrowing incident to which the short book points throughout, do not work except on the most obvious level as a symbol of unspeakable evil always loose somewhere in the world. Much better than the main story lines and characters are the sidebars, often mere glimpses, of other places and people. Jeremy's niece is elusive, sad, and always remotely present in his mind. The command of two girls who come to Bernard's rescue as he is about to be beaten by young thugs in a celebrating is deftly sketched as is the woman who commands Jeremy "Ca suffit" in the book's closing scenes. Berlin as the wall comes down is exciting and suffocating at once. Best of all, however, are McEwan's descriptions of the remote and ancient rural France where he retraces the pivotal day in Bernard and June's marriage. If you have not read any McEwan, Black Dogs is not the place to start. Those familiar with his work will also find this less memorable than much else he has written.

A good book that is best appreciated for the unbelievable beauty of the author's prose. McEwan writes sentences that normal humans -- or even talented writers -- could not pen in a 100 years. There's no one I've read that compares.

An extremely sophisticated look at two married people whose mental paths diverged at the very onset of their marriage many years in the past. The story is told by their son-in-law who clearly loves both people and seems to bring out the best of each. Historical vignettes are used to illustrate personality traits and thought processes of both the mother and the father-in-law; the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of these. It was like being there.
It was an extremely cleverly constructed book which did not seem unreadably "clever" as I turned the pages. I only marveled at how wonderfully it was put together and how everything "worked" in the days and weeks after I read it.
McEwan's descriptions, which have occasionally felt overdone to me(in his other books), worked extremely well here and I was not irritated by verbosity as I sometimes am. In fact the grammar, the construction, the tenses and the choice of words were so perfect that they disappeared completely from my observation while I was reading and only became apparent later when I stopped to think carefully about this book. A real gem. It's on my Xmas list for just about everyone I know!

"Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I have had my eye on other people's parents." With that intriguing first line, McEwan begins this story of what could be distilled as faith versus reason or how two people who, though they never stop loving each other, because they could not overcome their differing beliefs, separate and ultimately are tragic characters. Jeremy, the narrator, in his thirties met and married the daughter of June Tremaine and Bernard Tremaine after they had long been separated. The story line is simple. June and Bernard had been been members of the Communist Party. Because of an unfortunate event, their lives are irrevocably changed. "June came to God in 1946 through an encounter with evil in the form of two dogs. (Bernard found this construction of the event almost too embarrassing to discuss.)" The narrator sets about to write a memoir of these two individuals and looks into his own heart as well. "In this memoir I have included certain incidents from my own life. . . that are open equally to Bernard's and to June's kind of interpretation. . . Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whoses slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest."

All the earmarks of a McEwan novel are here. The writer appeals equally to the reader's intellect and emotions, and the story is filled with suspense. For example, we read constantly about the horrible event concerning the black dogs but do not find out what actually happened to June that fateful day in 1946 until late in the novel. Then there is the usual ambiguity with the two conflicting versions of what the dogs may or may not have done previously. As always, the writer's descriptive prose in impeccable. We have the narrator's description of June: "How did a round face become so long? Could it really have been the life, rather than the genes, that caused that little crease above the eyebrows pushed up by her smile to take root and produce the wrinkle tree that reached right to the hairline?" Finally, McEwan, while telling a good story, writes perceptive paragraph after paragraph about the nature of people. "It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turned out after all--who they married, the date of their death--with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us." That passage alone is more than enough to justify reading this book, as if one needed justification.

Ian McEwan is one of the great contemporary writers of fiction. One of the joys of living now is to read a new book by him--or to reread an old one.