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Summary
Summary
Black Dogs
Author Notes
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell.
He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this slim, provocative novel, McEwan ( The Innocent ) examines the conflict between intellect and feeling, as dramatized in one couple's troubled relationship. The narrator is fascinated by his wife's estranged parents, The lives of June and Bernard Tremaine, whose lives epitomize the tug-of-war between political engagement and a private search for ultimate meaning: their ideological and spiritual differences force them apart but never diminish their mutual love. The catalytic event in the Tremaines' lives occurs on their honeymoon in France in 1946. With the characteristic idealism of their generation, both had joined the Communist Party, but June is already becoming disenchanted with its claims. In an encounter with two huge, ferocious dogs--incarnations of the savagely irrational eruptions that recur throughout history--she has an insight that illumines for her the possibility of redemption. Liberally foreshadowed, --the bloodthirsty beasts are used as an overarching metaphor for the presence of evil in the world-- the actual episode with the dogs is not depicted until the book's final section, where its impact requires the reader to take a leap of faith similar to June's. For some this pivotal scene may not be fully convincing. Indeed, McEwan is rather too didactic in the exposition of his theme, so one may expect too much from the novel's dramatic main event. Yet the work is impressive; McEwan's meticulous prose, his shaping of his material to create suspense, and his adept use of specific settings--Poland's Majdanek concentration camp, Berlin during the dismantling of the Wall, a primitive area of the French countryside--produce a haunting fable about the fragility of civilization, always threatened by the cruelty latent in humankind. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
As in McEwan's last novel, The Innocent (1990), the Berlin Wall plays an important symbolic role in this fictional meditation on evil--a pseudo-memoir written from a post-cold-war perspective. The narrator, orphaned in his youth, has always been infatuated with his friends' parents and with the ``comfort and the conventions of his elders.'' After a lifetime of leaving places and people, he has now, in his 30s, found home in his own marriage and family. And he's particularly fascinated by his in-laws, a somewhat glamorous couple who split up after a few years of marriage, despite their undying love for each other. What came between them is nothing less than the defining issue of the century. While both Bernard and June Tremaine shared a youthful commitment to communism, Bernard maintains his materialistic view of things--even after he abandons the Party for mainstream Labour politics and a career as a popular pundit. June, on the other hand, rejects rationalism after a singular, profound incident in southern France while on her honeymoon in the late 40's. There, her confrontation with evil--manifest in some terrifying dogs left by the occupying Nazis--leads to her spiritual awakening and a life dedicated to meditation. The narrator, who professes disinterest (``I had no attachments, I believed in nothing''), nevertheless stacks things in June's favor. After all, the Berlin Wall is a testament to the very ideas clung to by Bernard. Despite his professed doubt, the narrator's own ``haunting'' forces him to recognize the power of June's contention that evil lurks within us all. McEwan explores the personal consequences of political ideas in this remarkably precise little novel. His lapidary prose neatly disguises his search for transcendence.
Booklist Review
The narrator of this taut, questioning tale is an orphan relentlessly drawn to other people's parents. This habit of attraction and need takes full form when Jeremy becomes intrigued with his in-laws. June is spiritual, reclusive, and fatally ill; Bernard is active, pragmatic, and political. They fell in love during the grieving yet determined days following World War II, united by an ardent and idealistic faith in communism and a bold sexual passion. But their bliss was short-lived. The source of the philosophical chasm that quickly opened between them, June's epiphanic confrontation with two black dogs in rural France, is alluded to often but not fully explained until the last chapter. Instead, Jeremy and June talk around it during his awkward visits, then he and Bernard rush to Berlin to see the Wall brought down and are sucked into the event's emotionally explosive atmosphere. McEwan deftly juxtaposes the personal against the political and the specific against the general, probing the essence of life's timeless moral dilemmas and dramatizing how differently people, even two people in love, comprehend the world. A penetrating, sus~penseful, and resonant work. McEwan's last novel was The Innocent [BKL Je 1 90]. ~--Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Having lost his parents in an auto accident when he was eight years old, the narrator of McEwan's splendid new novel is fascinated with other people's parents--particularly his remarkable in-laws, indissolubly linked yet estranged and combative almost since their wedding. A man of reason who was once a Communist, Bernard Tremaine cannot understand why his wife, June, rejected political activism for spiritual quest after ``an encounter with evil'' in the form of two fierce black dogs. McEwan does not so much tell their story as the story of the son-in-law's efforts to understand them better by writing about them. Though Bernard and June represent diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world--two views beautifully and succinctly captured by McEwan--they are not mere vessels of thought but lively, distinctive characters in their own right. As the narrator returns to the French countryside where June fatefully encountered the dogs, the deceptively simple buildup makes her brush with violence all the more shocking. A novel of ideas with the hard edge of a thriller; highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
