Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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It makes the impression that the author wanted to answer the ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but without the humorous focus of Douglas Adams, and without the number 42 guiding him through the maze of geopolitical and historical issues that haunt humankind. An anonymous reviewer in The Observer declared Black Dogs to be McEwan's best book yet, as did Andrew Billen. Jeremy is a sensitively depicted, pleasant enough character who "is found by love" in his late thirties. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside.

An understated yet as a whole quite potent tale that looks at the power that can be exerted by an exposure to evil and also of how differing personal ideologies can impact on loving human relationships. There is a witty analysis of contemporary life that appeals to me, put into occasionally brilliant prose. 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. Jeremy describes his own childhood, contrasting it with that of his wife, and tells of trips to the care home to talk to his mother-in-law, recounting snippets of her life.Only in Part Four do we learn what happened on their 1946 honeymoon trip to France: an encounter with literal black dogs that also has a metaphorical dimension, bringing back the horrors of World War II.

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’. I read this book in its entirety, breathlessly, while on a 10 hour flight to US, the first I ever took. reality of occupation by the Nazis and their evil depredations and the loss of life affecting every family and future generations. However, the reviewer also said the work remains "impressive; McEwan's meticulous prose, his shaping of his material to create suspense, and his adept use of specific settings [.His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004).

Usually, that happens when you don't have too many characters and so there are not many introductions to be made. The reason I'm writing now this whole thing is because with Black Dogs, it was completely different.What could have been made into a pleasing essay on the ambiguous nature of memory and desire, or the real and the ideal, gets lost in portentous Ploughman’s Lunch-style polemic. I desperately wish to share the final paragraph of this novel, but I will not, because I believe that it must be read at the end of this bizarre, short-lived novel to strike its note, which is like a solitary train horn - indeed as Giddens suggests - which resonates far into the night. It must be tempting to do this kind of thing when forty, and Janus-faced towards both youth and age, but it is very irritating if you don’t, like Mary Wesley, actually get it right.

However, the issue of balance between primary story and semi-autonomous sub-story becomes more prominent in later McEwan novels, for example Atonement: A Novel. Non so dire se la nostra civiltà che ormai si affaccia alla fine di questo millennio soffra più per una mancanza o per un eccesso di fede, se siano stati individui come Bernard e June a ridurci così, o non piuttosto tipi come me.They don’t have nearly enough sex, which, unlike politics, is one of the things McEwan is particularly good at describing. However, they are never as close as they were before their honeymoon, and June soon takes the three children and leaves Bernard to move to France. Ma forse anche una trama un po’ troppo arzigogolata, perfino per uno come McEwan che non sceglie mai intrecci lineari, quelli che vanno da A a B senza deviazioni. The black dogs that give Ian McEwan's new novel its evocative title come from the name that Winston Churchill once bestowed on his depressions. At June’s old house in France (Part Three), Jeremy feels her presence and seems to hear the couple’s voices.