Black Dogs

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Many of the themes explored in Ian McEwan’s previous fiction are treated anew in Black Dogs: the pain and isolation of childhood, as in The Cement Garden (1978); the inexplicable, violent nature of evil, as in The Comfort of Strangers (1981); and the effect of political, social, and psychological forces on the individual, as in The Innocent (1990). Black Dogs combines these subjects with religious and political beliefs and the history of twentieth century Europe as McEwan creates another original view of contemporary chaos.

Jeremy, the narrator, grows up in London longing for replacements for his dead parents. Living with Jean, his older sister, Harper, her loutish husband, and Sally, their neglected daughter, Jeremy spends considerable time with his friends’ parents. He hopes to find the stability, comfort, intellectual stimulation, and love missing from his life—except for the affection he attempts to provide to Sally, his honorary fellow orphan.

Jeremy remains partially dissociated from life until he, at the age of thirty-seven, marries Jenny Tremaine, adopting her parents as his own. June and Bernard Tremaine are Communists when they marry in 1946, but on their honeymoon in France, June undergoes a spiritual crisis. Although the couple remain in love until June’s death in 1987, their philosophical differences mar their relationship. Bernard leaves the party after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, writes a well-received biography of Gamal Abdel Nasser, becomes a frequent guest on radio and television broadcasts, and is elected to Parliament in 1964. June lives in France most of this time, writing about wildflowers and mystical subjects.

When June’s health forces her into an English nursing home, Jeremy visits her for interviews upon which he will base a memoir. McEwan offers only brief glimpses of the pivotal event in June’s life until he presents Jeremy’s memoir as the fourth and final major section of Black Dogs. By that time, he has masterfully created a mythic significance for June’s battle with two black dogs.

Black Dogs is compelling on several levels. One is as a portrait of June, Bernard, and their unusual marriage. June’s sensibility dominates the novel, with Jeremy almost as much in love with her, despite her difficult personality, as with Jenny, her daughter and his wife. Jeremy and June disagree about the focus of the memoir during the interviews, June wanting him to write a biography, Jeremy having in mind “more a divagation” in which she will be central but not dominant. In writing about June, Jeremy says as much about himself, tries to explain to himself the nature of evil and the spirit of his times.

Contributing to Jeremy’s obsession with his mother-in-law is a photograph taken the day she and Bernard became members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Jeremy seeks the woman’s character in the picture, the woman she is to become. He wonders at how June could have been so profoundly altered by time, her face becoming long, her nose lengthened, chin curved, forehead amazingly creased. The wrinkled June resembles the elderly W. H. Auden: “In repose her face had a chiseled, sepulchral look; it was a statue, a mask carved by a shaman to keep at bay the evil spirit.” Jeremy thinks that June’s face changed to accommodate her belief that she has been tested by evil. Attracted to the younger June, he sees in her older self something “extraordinary.”

Jeremy describes June’s life as a spiritual quest, but Bernard, evolving from Communist outsider to liberal politician, is almost her opposite. Bernard is also a man of contradictions. Although a socialist, he disdains the working class. When a taxi driver...

(This entire section contains 1858 words.)

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attempts to enter his and Jeremy’s conversation about the state of Europe, Bernard rudely ignores the man. In justifying his lack of a common touch by explaining that he is a man of ideas, Bernard illustrates the rationalism June abhors. The difference between the two is clear even while June is confronted by the dogs. Bernard is three hundred yards away, sketching caterpillars: “Bernard did not derive pleasure from sketching, nor did his drawings resemble what he saw. They represented what he knew, or wanted to know.”

McEwan presents this marriage as one in which the partners share little but their love. June constantly ridicules Bernard to Jeremy, considering him “unreflective, ignorant of the subtle currents that composed the reality he insisted he understood and controlled.” Bernard neglects visiting his dying wife, attempting to maneuver Jeremy into conveying “the illusion that he was perfectly intact without her” and that he loves her “despite her evident madness.”

Bernard, at least, acknowledges his failings in their relationship: “I was cold, theoretical, arrogant. I never showed any emotion, and I prevented her from showing it. She felt watched, analyzed, she felt she was part of my insect collection.” June attacks him for wanting to organize everything neatly. His political beliefs stem not from compassion for his fellow man but from a need to impose order on society. Bernard criticizes June for bending facts to fit her view of the world: “My wife might have been interested in poetic truth, or spiritual truth, or her own private truth, but she didn’t give a damn for truth, for the facts, for the kind of truth that two people could recognize independently of each other.” Jeremy accuses them both of loading each other with their own guilt.

Jeremy is fascinated by this couple not only because they are his substitute parents but also because he has lacked a system of belief: “there was simply no good cause, no enduring principle, no fundamental idea with which I could identify, no transcendent entity whose existence I could truthfully, passionately, or quietly assert.” He represents the contemporary bourgeois European: materially comfortable, slightly cynical, satisfied with his disbelief. As a teenager, Jeremy is most at ease when playing with Sally, since he mistrusts and fears the outside world. He separates himself from his contemporaries by intellectual pomposity and disdain for their activities: “They could range freely because they were secure; I needed the hearths they had deserted.” After leaving the University of Oxford without a degree, Jeremy establishes a drifter’s pattern of leaving dwellings, jobs, friends, and lovers until he finds Jenny and commitment, then becomes a parent himself.

Comfortable with retreating into the family he and Jenny create, Jeremy remains mostly disengaged from the larger world until he visits the site of his in-laws’ honeymoon. Seeing a boy mistreated by his parents in a hotel restaurant, Jeremy is challenged by the father and responds by beating him severely: “I knew that the elation driving me had nothing to do with revenge and justice.” He sees in himself the savage potential lurking beneath the placid exterior of modern Europe.

This savagery is best exemplified by the dogs June encounters at St. Maurice de Navacelles. She sees two huge black dogs in the distance and immediately begins attaching greater significance to them: “they were the embodiment of the nameless, unreasonable, unmentionable disquiet she had felt that morning.” She is frightened of them not because they are dogs but because they are so enormous and have appeared out of nowhere in this isolated setting. She falls, cuts her arm, and, terrified that the blood will provoke their attack, defends herself with rocks. When one leaps onto her, she stabs it with a penknife until both beasts run away.

June and Bernard later learn from the villagers that the dogs had been brought there by the Gestapo during the German occupation. The mayor claims that two men saw the dogs being forced to rape a woman, but Bernard refuses to believe this tale, saying that June trusts it because it fits so neatly into her interpretation of her experience. June considers her instinctive understanding of the dogs’ evil to be the essence of her spiritual transformation. For June, her battle with the dogs “explained everything—why she left the party,…why she reconsidered her rationalism, her materialism, how she came to live the life she did, where she lived it, what she thought.” Jeremy is skeptical about the overwhelming significance attached to one event until his beating of the brutish father. How June translates the evil of the dogs into what she calls “an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness” is another matter.

When Jeremy visits Poland in 1981 as part of a cultural delegation and meets Jenny, she insists that he accompany her to the concentration camp of Majdanek. When she notices that the sign listing the nationalities of the victims does not mention Jews, she says to herself, “The black dogs.” Jeremy, who accompanies Bernard to Berlin to see the collapse of the Berlin Wall only to be caught up in a potentially fatal mob scene, comes to see the dogs as symbolic of tyranny in Europe. The novel ends with his vision of the dogs moving “into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.”

The nature of belief is at the center of Black Dogs. Jeremy finds himself annoyed both by June’s “optimistic prattle” and by Bernard’s “sonorous platitudes.” In an imaginary argument with them, Jeremy says, “It’s not the business of science to prove or disprove the existence of God, and it’s not the business of the spirit to measure the world.” He finds Bernard’s skepticism too arrogant and June’s faith too smugly virtuous. To Jeremy, his in-laws “are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest.”

Like all McEwan’s novels, Black Dogs is a meditation on alienation. June retreats from it into spirituality, Bernard into socialism, Jeremy into family life. McEwan suggests that contemporary religion and politics offer no solutions to life’s complexities and that sincerely caring for those closest to one is as good a defense against alienation as any. Jeremy states his humanistic belief “in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life.” June admits that despite their philosophical differences, she and Bernard love each other deeply. Their love, however, is insufficient to create “a simple society” in which they can coexist easily.

Black Dogs, which lacks the irony and dark humor of most of McEwan’s fiction, is an eloquently pessimistic view of the future of civilization. Nazism can be defeated, totalitarian dictatorships can collapse, yet new horrors will arise. Individuals cannot prevent or effectively combat such evil. They can only, McEwan implies, hope to hold off the chaos in their daily lives.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIX, October 15, 1992, p. 402.

The Guardian. June 18, 1992, p. 27.

Library Journal. CXVII, October 1, 1992, p. 120.

London Review of Books. XIV, June 25, 1992, p. 20.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 20, 1992, p. 3.

The New Republic. CCVII, November 16, 1992, p. 41.

New Statesman and Society. V, June 19, 1992, p. 26.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, November 8, 1992, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, September 14, 1992, p. 103.

The Spectator. CCLXVIII, June 27, 1992, p. 32.

Time. CXL, November 16, 1992, p. 103.

The Times Literary Supplement. June 19, 1992, p. 20.

The Wall Street Journal. November 16, 1992, p. A8.

The Washington Post Book World. XXII, October 25, 1992, p. 4.

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