Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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For me, it was a fascinating account of some of Europe's most turbulent moments, recounted from the viewpoint of the common man, which always makes for valuable insight. Again McEwan addresses the effects of evil on the innocent, this time in the context of World War II. Black Dogs is a dark and brooding masterpiece from Booker-prize winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan.

The surface of my skin had become an organ of perception, sensitized to darkness and to every molecule of air. McBride of The Harvard Crimson praised McEwan's psychological insight and argued, “ Black Dogs challenges us to confront the tension we all feel in the meeting of science and religion, the rational and the irrational. A terminally ill person was "buried in a sleep that had itself been smothered in an illness" so on waking, "she had to reconstruct her whole existence, who and where she was.One of the glummest features of modern culture is that women hardly bother to read novels by men any more, or vice versa. 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’.

Jeremy è in perenne ricerca di essere simbolicamente adottato, ambisce a ritrovare due nuovi genitori: da piccolo ha provato con quelli dei suoi migliori amici, adesso invece è nei suoceri, per quanto separati, che sente d’aver trovato ostello affettivo. Jeremy speaks to Bernard and June separately: he interviews Bernard during a 1989 trip to Berlin to celebrate the fall of Communism; he talks to June as she lies in a nursing home, reassessing her life. An anonymous reviewer in The Observer declared Black Dogs to be McEwan's best book yet, as did Andrew Billen.The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside.

The liturgy at a funeral was "a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine". After June’s death, Jeremy takes Bernard to Berlin (Part Two) to soak up the atmosphere just after the Wall comes down, but the elderly man is kicked by a skinhead. McEwan, un poco en modo Zadie Smith, elige hacernos escuchar las dos perspectivas (la de la que cambió y la del que cree que ese cambio fue una locura) en las voces de un matrimonio separado.

McEwan has always been good at conjuring the external malignancy which lovers fear; and by far the best writing comes, as in The Comfort of Strangers, at the end.

The novel tackles diverse themes, which intersect in interesting ways, though they arise in ad hoc rather than deliberate ways, and their treatment is not sufficiently meaningful. Depression is never really addressed, which is odd, given the title: the book even mentions that "the black dog" was how Churchill personified his depressive episodes. Now time, afternoon time, which in the Midi is as elemental as air and light, expanded and rolled billowingly outwards across the rest of the day, and upwards to the vaults of the cobalt sky, freeing everyone in its delicious sprawl from their obligations. Poet Craig Raine billed it as "a novel whose formal perfection was so subtle that most critics failed to notice. Despite their privileged backgrounds and refined education, they have limited practical life experience.Bernard, travelling with Jeremy to watch the Berlin Wall come down, dismisses his wife’s deism as ‘magical thinking’.