Lisa's Reviews > Black Dogs

I have read many Ian McEwans, and I am always divided whether I like them or not. There is a witty analysis of contemporary life that appeals to me, put into occasionally brilliant prose. There are characters with interesting traits, and plots that usually have an abrupt twist in the end.

It uses to be an entertaining and quick reading experience between heavier, more thought-provoking and more linguistically challenging (and satisfying) classics or historical nonfiction.

But this was below par, even considering my moderate expectations. It makes the impression that the author wanted to answer the ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but without the humorous focus of Douglas Adams, and without the number 42 guiding him through the maze of geopolitical and historical issues that haunt humankind.

He touches on the problems of disillusionment of old communists, but drops it before gaining the power of a Koestler, then moves on to the kind of communist reflection Lessing offers in The Golden Notebook, interweaving the political with personal, intimate relationships, but again without elaborating and giving the characters depth.

There is a tedious discourse between two characters regarding religion versus atheism, without offering any new angle or solution, of course.

“You are in separate realms”, is the solution offered by the protagonist-narrator, not very helpful, as the characters are still presiding over their different world view realms in the same room, and it is “going round and round”.

Throw in short reflections on the Berlin Wall, and the Holocaust, and sex and family life in the 1980s, and being an orphan and turning into a cuckoo in other people’s families, and you are far away from the supposed main theme (according to the title) of depression: Black Dogs.

“So June´s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation´s worst moods.”

It is a typically short McEwan novel, and all these diverse topics are too important to be mentioned en passant, while the characters randomly discuss different anecdotes from their respective pasts.

Too much and too little, at the same time, which the narrator seems to subconsciously understand while he is struggling to keep the story together:

“I am uncertain whether our civilisation at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me.”

Unfortunately, the narrator can’t make the arithmetic mean between the extreme positions work out either, as the ideas are in different realms… If you take a couple of apples and pears, add them together, and then divide them by two, you do not get a perfect pearapple, but rather a mash, which is what this book is to me.

In the realm of my literary universe, this one sank to the bottom of the ocean.