Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

There is no doubt that Ian McEwan is a great storyteller who won’t hesitate to tell rather bleak and creepy stories in order to make points about the human condition in general and contemporary life in particular. At least for this reader, there are times when the creepiness of the story trumps the profundity of his psychological analysis (The Comfort of Strangers jumps to mind), but in the rather foreboding tale, Black Dogs, the reverse is true. While on the surface the story is one of the long unraveling of a genuine love relationship between two people of different temperaments, I think McEwan is really trying to raise and discuss intelligently a split within the human psyche.

The surface story is one of two young lovers who, shortly after the end of World War II, quit their government jobs in England, declare their allegiance to the Communist Party (which they could not have done while still employed by the state), and set off to discover for themselves post-war Italy and France. Bernard and June Tremaine, convinced that the end of the war will also signal the end of capitalism and the beginning of a mass movement towards socialism, decide to hike and walk the towns and countryside of France and Italy as a honeymoon present to each other before returning home to help in building the new world.

Their tale is told by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who is living in the Europe of the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having lost his own parents in a road accident when he is only eight, he has an eye on the parents of his friends, fascinated by intact families and by what makes some marriages click while others fray and unravel. Jeremy finds himself deeply attracted to both Bernard and June, though they have long lived apart.

Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest. In Bernard’s company, I always sensed there was an element missing from his account of the world, and that it was June who held the key. The assurance of his skepticism, his invincible atheism, made me wary; it was too arrogant, too much was closed off, too much denied. In conversations with June, I found myself thinking like Bernard; I felt stifled by her expressions of faith, and bothered by the unstated assumption of all believers that they are good because they believe what they believe, that faith is virtue and, by extension, unbelief is unworthy, or at best pitiable.

The deep division between June and Bernard, as well as their abiding love for each other, fascinates Jeremy, and he sets out to write the memoirs of June via interviews conducted on her deathbed.

It is important to remember that McEwan, himself, is no friend of the great religions of the world. A defender of his compatriot Christopher Hitchens, and at least somewhat sympathetic to a group of intellectuals sometimes dubbed The Evangelical Atheists (e.g., biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Sam Harris, and philosopher Daniel Dennett), McEwan understands clearly the dangers of religious fundamentalism. However, he is suspicious of the wholesale dismissal of all that gets called spiritual and of exaggerated claims by some scientists that the lens of science has already (or will very soon) see things as they are in themselves and forever render as both absurd and unnecessary talk of a spiritual realm.

The black dogs of the title are no doubt metaphors for wild, irrational evil in the world, but June faces them also as living, breathing, attacking beasts that she encounters on a hiking trail in Italy. She has been momentarily separated from Bernard, who is straggling behind, literally on his knees in the dirt studying some biological life-form that is new to him. And while, once the two are reunited, he is all sympathetic concern towards his young bride and the frightful experience she has just had, this event and their reactions to it set the stage for their inevitable turning away from one another. June, having survived this ordeal without the help of her husband, learns from it that she has courage, that she can if necessary stand alone, “That’s a significant discovery for a woman, or it was in my day.” Over the course of years as they return to London and begin a family, Bernard devotes himself to parliamentary politics and to what June sees as “faith in abstract principals according to which committed intellectuals think to engineer social change.” June turns inward and to the practical and immediate. They buy a small, unimproved vacation property in France to which she retreats. She studies the mystics, studies wild flowers, returns to London less and less often.

Jeremy serves as a kind of mediator between these two loving and yet incompatible people, able to listen to both, partly because he finds parts of himself in both of their worldviews, and yet is himself unable to synthesize and make compatible the disparate sides.

As the family outsider, I was both beguiled and skeptical. Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth. Seeing the light, the moment of truth, the turning point—surely we borrow these from Hollywood or the Bible to make retroactive sense of an overcrowded memory. June’s ‘black dogs.’ Sitting here at the bedside notebook in my lap, privileged with a glimpse of her void, sharing in the vertigo, I found these almost nonexistent animals too comforting.

No doubt Jeremy serves a special purpose in this little novel; his is the voice that allows McEwan to continue the inward struggle between cool (even cold) rationality and a sense of something different, something more, something not to be named or neatly cordoned off. Gifted writer and intellectual that he is, McEwan does not in the end attempt a reconciliation, a convenient blending of the alleged contradictories. He is willing simply to present them, describe them, and leave them in suspension—not to be homogenized.

Bernard and June often talked to me about ideas that could never sit side by side. Bernard for example, was certain that there was no direction, no patterning in human affairs or fates other than that which was imposed by human minds. June could not accept this; life had a purpose and it was in our interests to open ourselves to it. Nor will it do to suggest that both these views are correct. To believe everything, to make no choices, amounts to much the same thing, to my mind, as believing in nothing at all.

Next Of Kin by Johanna Trollope

There are some writers who provide readers a kind of oasis of hope and solace even when writing about an unpredictable and in many ways menacing world. Johanna Trollope is one such writer, and her novel Next of Kin leaves the reader with a kind of guarded optimism in facing an uncertain future. At least on the surface, this is a story about how families adapt to grief and loss, and even if that were all there is to the novel, it would be well worth reading. Trollope creates characters who seem real, situations that seem in some way or other universal, and moral dilemmas that retain their complexity even as she points the way towards a resolution.

I don’t know about other readers, but I like reading authors who describe our current historical situation and who are willing to reveal the many casualties of contemporary life, in short, writers who choose to tell the truth rather than simply entertaining us or allowing us to escape real life. That said, I have to admit that many writers brave enough to describe the world as they see it also sometimes leave the reader with a sense of despair and hopelessness, since the authors are unable to mask their own cynicism as they describe the world around them. After reading a series of such books describing city life and some of the horrors it contains, I find myself yearning for something that is more positive, something that leaves room for hope and encourages actions that might create a future better than the past. So I turn to writers like Trollope as much for relief as for enlightenment, and she seldom disappoints me.

Next of Kin is about an extended family of British farmers, two brothers, one of whom continues with his parents to produce crops, and the other who chooses instead to begin a stock farm for both dairy and meat production. Both brothers find themselves competing with agribusiness and thus borrow over and over to purchase machinery and equipment that allows a kind of marginal competition in the new world they find themselves in, but in fact brings them ever closer to financial ruin and loss of their farms.

The novel really begins with the death of the wife of one of the brothers. Carolyn, or Caro as she is called, is an American who wanders to England in her early twenties in an existential search for some sort of meaningful life and a kind of permanence that she has never achieved with her own alternative culture parents and their nomadic existence. There she meets and marries her dairy farmer husband, Robyn; they adopt a daughter and then slowly but inexorably drift into separate lives lived under the same roof. The other brother, Joe, marries even later than Robyn, quickly has two children with his very non-farmer young wife, and builds what his parents and others see as a successful and thriving farm; his parents live their lives through him. He is their hero and their hope.

What neither Joe’s parents nor his wife understand is that he has been secretly borrowing for years, attempting to keep up with the demands of contemporary farming, and all the while barely keeping in check a dark, brooding anxiety and sense of hopelessness. For reasons never made clear the death of his sister-in-law Caro destroys a desperate hope he has been able to maintain, and shortly after her death, he shoots himself in a shed at his parent’s home.

Trollope’s deep understanding of human nature and of familial relations comes out in her descriptions of how the other characters in the novel react to Joe’s death. That the parents have lived for and through their son Joe is apparent in their devastation at his death. And his young wife, Lindsay, who has been trying for all of her years with Joe to reach him emotionally, eventually in desperation trying to warn her in-laws about his underlying psychological turmoil, is both devastated and bitter when her warnings go unheeded and her husband flees in the only way he can.

In this story of loss and change, there is one character who plays the role of catalyst for getting the family to move from petrified grief to a kind of healing and carrying on. She is an unlikely candidate for heroine—a punked up city-girl who knows nothing of farms or farm life and who does not even cook or clean for herself. Zoe, the city girl, enters the action via becoming the London roommate of Judy, the adopted daughter of Robyn and Caro, and inviting herself along on a visit to the country.

No doubt, some readers will see Zoe as bit too idealized, a too convenient free spirit brought in from the wings to get the family members to admit feelings and to begin to really talk to one another. But I found her to be almost believable, and a rather ingenious way for Trollope to bring in her own views on grief and change, on parenting, on what gets called conventional morality, even on the whole issue of biological, so-called  ‘real’, as opposed to adoptive (unreal?) parents.

I find the end of the novel to be optimistic and uplifting, although the best Robyn can do in order to actually stay on his farm and continue being a farmer requires him to sell his land and lease it back (just as his parents have always leased the land they farm). Each of the characters in the novel is brought to some sort of realization, one could even call it enlightenment. As Robyn tells his daughter Judy that she can come back from London, can stay on the farm if she chooses, though he must sell the land and hope to lease it back, she remarks, “Even though it’s so hard. Even though it’s always been so hard?”

Yes….I  wouldn’t want to live any other way now. I suppose I may have to, one day, but I’ll only give in at the last ditch.

While I must admit that as a reader I run to Trollope in order to relieve momentarily the gloom and doom of so much excellent contemporary fiction, I get more than the relief I had hoped for. I learn about people, about families, about relationships, and even when what I learn is sad and sobering, it is also tinged with hope.

In the end, even Dilys, the mother of Robyn and Joe, the person who is perhaps the most devastated by his suicide, the most hopeless, comes to some sort of resolution.

Change and loss, she said to herself, change and loss, like a chant, over and over, life carrying you away, carrying things away from you, then bringing them back, some little thing you didn’t look for, didn’t know you needed until you saw it washed up there, waiting at your feet. Change and loss. And growth. Growth where you had never looked for it before, never thought to look.

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Ghost Road, by Pat Barker

“Murder was only killing in the wrong place.” So reflects Rivers, the therapist who is a central character in all three of the novels in Pat Barker’s incredible World War I trilogy. Ghost Road is the third of the trilogy, and the one for which she received The Booker Prize, though Regeneration, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the prize and any one of the three would have deserved the prestigious award.

This is not a glorification of war book. Instead, it talks of the war and the battlefield in graphic and horrible detail that shows the bravery of the men who fought, but also the corruption of the British class system and the money interests of big business, especially as the war drags on long after if should have with men dying not to secure the victory, but to line the pockets of business men who are more interested in profits than the lives of soldiers.

Many of the characters in the novel, including the therapist Rivers, are drawn from actual historical figures. In fact, this novel actually moves back and forth between the battlefront, the hospital where Rivers treats both the physically and psychologically wounded, and cultures in the south seas where Rivers spent time as researcher and doctor before the war started. The so-called tribes he dealt with were descendants of head-hunting people and both the heads brought home from raids and the captives brought back from those same raids played pivotal roles in their cultural lives.

Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the people’s lives. Head-hunting was what they had lived for. Though it might seem callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most tremendous fun and without it life lost almost all zest.

It is no accident that Barker compares the head-hunters with atrocities of the war. While we may excuse the actions of the warriors in World War I while condemning as barbaric the head-hunters, Barker is less quick to judge.

As you might guess, this is not a happy book, but then none of Barker’s books is happy. Just as her earlier novels focused in on blue-collar workers and their struggles for a decent life given the brutality of market economies, so too in this one she focuses not on officers but on enlisted men who have everything to lose in fighting the war, and yet very little to gain by its so-called successful conclusion.

Besides the sadness of the events, the grimness of the novel is accentuated by Barker’s  simple and often harsh prose. Billy Prior, who is another genuine historical character who appears in all three of the novels, is unashamedly bisexual. Many of the sex scenes she describes are cold and repelling, and yet there is honesty in her prose that shines forth. Like the prostitutes who are the focus of her second novel, Blow Your House Down, there is nothing sentimental about Prior’s descriptions of his sexual relationships with either men or women; sex is simply a part of life, sometimes bartered, sometimes given as a gift, sometimes taken on the fly.

For this reader, both this novel and Regeneration were most interesting because of the accounts of the varied and horrific sorts of physic conditions suffered in the trench warfare of World War I, and the surprisingly compassionate care William Rivers gives to the men whom he encounters at Craiglockhart’s, the British hospital where the wounded are sent to be ‘fixed’ and sent back to the front. Of course, when Rivers succeeds, his charges are sent back to the French front, not because they are truly healed, but because they can, at least, talk again, or walk, or sleep without impossibly horrible dreams.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think—at least not beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

…the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now—any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think’s the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

Perhaps I have described this book too bleakly; there is warmth and even humor in it along with the chilling battle scenes. While I have to admit that I am ready to move onto something less intense, less troubling, this is a book all of us should read. Indeed, every book of Barker’s I have read has been well worth the time and effort. She is one of the finest writers alive.

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