Black Dogs

by Ian McEwan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

An emotional novel balancing the sprawling impact of post-Nazi Europe against the internal struggles of one couple and family, the tension spreads outward as the consequences of past actions come back to rattle a married couple and their son-in-law. This was a somewhat polarizing novel for critics but those that love it have considered it one of McEwan’s best.

Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this novel is the intimate story of the crumbling of a marriage, as witnessed by an outsider—from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement.

Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier—a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time.

In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods—its black dogs—with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385494328
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/29/1998
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	1,097,496
Product dimensions:	5.17(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

IAN MCEWAN is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen novels and two short story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement; Saturday; On Chesil Beach; Solar; Sweet Tooth; The Children Act; Nutshell; and Machines Like Me, which was a number-one bestseller. Atonement, Enduring Love, The Children Act and On Chesil Beach have all been adapted for the big screen.

Hometown:

Oxford, England

Date of Birth:

June 21, 1948

Place of Birth:

Aldershot, England

Education:

B.A., University of Sussex, 1970; M.A., University of East Anglia, 1971

Website:

http://www.ianmcewan.com

Reading Group Guide

Ian McEwan's novel Black Dogs showcases the author's range and skill as he delivers unlikely, and welcome, combinations of suspense, ethics, philosophy, and political and religious ideology. In lesser hands, such a mix might be lethal. In McEwan's, it's intoxicating.

1. The narrator, Jeremy, sets himself up in the preface as the pole opposite June and Bernard. He says that they have too much belief and he has too little. By the end of the novel, does Jeremy make a choice? Does he believe in something?

2. Whose story is this? June and Bernard's? Or Jeremy's?

3. Discuss the author's decision to use the mock memoir form to tell this story.

4. In Black Dogs the author presents the conflict between emotion and rationality—the women are on one side, the men on another. Is this a gender divide?

5. June and Bernard loved each other, but couldn't live a life together. June admits this and ponders how millions of people can be expected to get along when two people can't. Does this novel ultimately present a bleak view of life?

6. Bernard accuses June of sacrificing him and their children for a final, personal end. Do you agree that she did?

7. June's confrontation with the black dogs is close to ten pages long (pages 119-127). Look at it closely and talk about how the author builds suspense and adds to the ominous tone of something important about to happen.

8. In the author's novels, moments of clarity, of certainty, or of important questions being asked or answered often take place in nature. Why do you think McEwan makes this choice?

9. Would Bernard and June have been able to continue to live together as a married couple if Bernard hadn't been busy examining a caterpillar during her confrontation with the black dogs?

10. Bernard feels the weight of the sadness in Europe late in the novel when he finally sees the war "not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust" (page 140). How does this relate to the Lao-tzu quotation earlier in the novel (page 13)?

11. Can a person be happy when evil exists in the world? Is this novel a warning to be on guard?

12. Talk about the title of this and any other novels you have read by Ian McEwan. In what ways are they both a question and an answer?

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant.... [A] meditation on ... the intoxications and the redemptive power of love." —The New Yorker

"Subtle and unforgettable." —Voice Literary Supplement

"The novel's vision of Europe is acute and alive, vivid in its moral complexities ... we are conquered by the humanity, the urgency, of the novel's characters." —The New York Times Book Review

"Each scene is brilliantly lit, and has a characteristically strange fascination as Ian McEwan juxtaposes 'huge and tiny currents' to show the ways in which individuals react to history." —The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

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.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

This fictional memoir scrutinizes the beliefs and personalities of Bernard and June Tremaine, the in-laws of the narrator. Their path toward greater meaning in life, whether through Bernard’s political activism or June’s spiritual reflections, is charted by their son-in-law, who responds to their oblique progress over the decades. The title refers to an incident when June is menaced by two dogs symbolizing modern evil. The novel is rich in thought, personality, and metaphor, which are nicely nuanced by Steven Crossley’s understated reading. Crossley absorbs the listener by giving an appropriately casual and reflective reading. His half-amused tones reveal the narrator’s affection for his in-laws and his inability to accept their shifting views. G.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 06 - AudioFile