black dogs : ian mcewan.

There’s a savory depth to this book. When I pull back enough to think of the whole work conceptually, it’s the layers of the pie that first demand comment. McEwan gives us a novel posed as a memoir, with two very different but inseparable narrative threads pulled by the intellectual and spiritual biographies of the writer’s parental in-laws, who, though still married, are long estranged; the primary crisis having arisen very early on, back in the 1950s, when they belonged to the Communist Party. Fun and romantic, he gangly and she graceful, both of them drowned in idealism—a pair of smiling and hopeful young British communists.

They’re early in their marriage, hiking in the European mountains, when June, the wife, has a Hitchcockian encounter with two black dogs that lastingly alters her belief in the order of things. The black dogs, who may or may not be instruments of terror biologically engineered by the Nazis but left behind after the occupation, do away with June’s inclination and/or ability to hold herself according to the rational nature of life. Her husband, Bernard, veers exclusively to logical layer of the pie, and his affinity for the Party is largely explained in this way, as being a logical framework to bring people even-handed solutions. Bernard was up the path a ways when the dogs confronted June, having been held up by these fascinating insects he was compelled to count the legs on, or something.

This, the encounter to which the title speaks, is the centerpiece of the whole arrangement; it’s the pithy center of the pie, of what’s compelled our narrator to seek out the stories and tacit counsel of the couple, the two separate parts of this diametrically opposed pair.

Why do you sound like you’re trying to write the stuffiest 10th-grade book report ever? you ask. You said you were gonna talk about the “layers of the pie”—which sounded kinda like crap at the time, but that was before you started to see how many syllables you could fit into a sentence without being interesting. You make a good point. The crazy part is that I’ve stuck to my notes so far—it’s just that I’m still relating to you the details that evoke the first part of my first point, which is the backwardness of the whole affair:

- The encounter with the black dogs is the denouement of a relationship that would continue for decades after

- Said encounter makes up the title, and is alluded to throughout the book, but is only told to us right near the end, like a proper denouement

- Though the narrator never says so, the black dogs are the driving force of his efforts—he wants to understand them, and doesn’t.

For as complicated as I’m making this, you can really simply appreciate the tightness, the emotional layers of the characters present in McEwan’s prose, by finishing the book and setting down next to you: it’s 145 pages long; the paperback is ¼” thinner than my cell phone. And four or five degrees of really complex theory of mind are at work in those pages.

The narrative turns, in the latter part of the tale, as the account of the black dogs is finally being given. There’s a break from the 2nd person voice, and it comes so naturally, I’d gone for pages before I realized the storyteller had left; nobody was telling the story; the story was just happening.

The change in style—as the 2nd person drops away, what steps in is an action-oriented tone—serves another purpose: This was the fracture point between to lovers. It became the definite pivot around which they would ground their respective life philosophies. But, strangely, the material shift of the narrative voice has a converse effect; beautifully, it brings a substance to the ambiguity of the pair’s differences.

That’s an obtuse book-report way of saying it, so let me try again: I loved this book. The end of this book, after I’d put it down, made me understand selfishness, as it relates to love, in a way that was new to me.