|
|
black dogs - ian mcewan |
|
This piece appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992 Languedoc, 1946. June and Bernard Tremaine, middle class English people on a honeymoon walking tour of the Causse de Larzac, descend into the gorge of the river Vis. She is twenty five years old. He is a Cambridge science graduate, a keen amateur entomologist with "a nice shy way of talking to his elders." They have just joined the Communist Party. Bernard will not leave it until the last minute: 1956, and the Hungarian uprising. June's politics are already fatally mixed up with her sense of being alive in the world, with "beechwoods, cornfields, sunlight". Bernard will later describe this as "self indulgence". Nevertheless, it's he who stops first on the path into the gorge, to watch and record the behaviour of some caterpillars; leaving June to walk on alone and confront two starved black dogs the size of donkeys. Terrified, she stabs one of them, and they run off. Thus begins a lifelong ideological quarrel. June believes that in the gorge she "met evil and discovered God." Bernard thinks she made too much of it. By the early Fifties they are finding it impossible to live together. June retreats to Languedoc, abandoning Communism in favour of "mediums, self-healing, the collective unconscious, the 'Christ within us'". Bernard joins the Labour Party. While he settles himself on the moderate wing, becoming first a member of parliament then a TV pundit, June is publishing Mystical Grace: Selected Writings of St Teresa of Avila. He thinks she's "cooking the books", presenting private truths as absolutes. She says of him, "'He's never known a single moment's awe for the beauty of creation. He hates silence, so he knows nothing.'" June contracts leukaemia and returns to England. After her death Bernard visits Germany, to watch East Berliners streaming into the West. He has developed a way of "presenting all his opinions as well-established facts." Facts are not the point here: almost from the outset we know everything. Cunningly, Ian McEwan tells the story twice. His narrator, the Tremaine's son-in-law Jeremy, spends threequarters of the novel assembling material for a family memoir. Orphaned early, Jeremy has had thirty years practise at collecting other people's parents. He interviews June, embarrassedly, at her bedside. He goes irritably to Berlin with Bernard. He carries tales between them. He upsets his wife Jenny, who is sick to death of the family myth. Meanwhile he is unearthing history the way we always unearth it, out of unreliable testimony and conflicting motives. Everyone has an axe to grind. The fourth part of Black Dogs presents the memoir itself, a perfect little Ian McEwan short story, almost independent of the rest of the text, "a morality distilled from a sequence of actions". As readers we know exactly how to react. Part Four relieves our anxiety by shaping and ordering. What we learnt piecemeal we now appreciate as a whole. McEwan first shows us what can be known, only then what we want to know: what it all means. A story is not a story until someone--in this case Jeremy--needs it for his own purposes. If The Child in Time began McEwan's retreat from a terminally-ironised condition, Black Dogs seems to confirm it. "I would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life," says Jeremy; and much of what he has to tell is a love story of the 1940s. He finds himself unimpressed by that time. It was "a junkshop exploding in slow motion," he thinks; and describes June's first moment of sexual delight as one of "criminal freedom" in an Orwellian world of "brown and black and grey." (She washes the sheets afterwards, less to hide the evidence, one suspects, than to acknowledge guilt.) June and Bernard remain sexually obsessed by one another. Even as she is dying, June is jealous of Bernard's housekeeper. They have lived apart for over twenty years but they can't let one another be. They have tired one another out, not just through ideological opposition but through the demands of a love they couldn't manage. McEwan was always good at love; but suspicious of it. As an alternative he offered a sort of successful weariness--people thankful to be with one another in the aftermath of some struggle stated or unstated. Your sense of humour was engaged. You were thankful perhaps that your own experience, though equally ramshackle, had been just a little bit less disappointing. If that was good enough for you, you found him realistic. If not, he seemed absent minded, as if despite a clear attempt to focus on the subject, his attention was always elsewhere. Here, the struggle is seen to be part of the love. "The truth is," June complains, "we love each other, we've never stopped, we're obsessed. And we failed to do a thing with it. We couldn't make a life. We couldn't give up the love, but we wouldn't bend to its power..." In an earlier book this statement would have revealed a system of interleaving innocence and corruption, clarified momentarily by the light of a sudden, appalling act of violence before it slipped out of focus into a kind of Alfred Hitchcock farce. In Black Dogs what you see is what you get. Granted, nothing is quite the comfort it once was: McEwan's characters live in a daze of change, scratch their heads over states of affairs already obsolete, topple over the edge of each moment like the Fool in the Tarot pack. Though he is honest and determined, Jeremy's conclusions are inconclusive, postmodern. McEwan treats him quite without the customary mercilessness. There was no innocence in The Innocent; there were no strangers in The Comfort of Strangers: but here, when Jeremy tells us, "I never had any doubts about it...looking after children is one way of looking after yourself," he means it. What about the black dogs ? Were they, as the Maire of Mauriac claimed at the time, Nazi guard dogs once trained to rape women and now living wild out on the Causse de Larzac ? June is half-convinced. Bernard is contemptuous. McEwan claims to be unable to help us. The dogs lope endlessly off into the Gorge du Vis every time June Tremaine closes her eyes, ordering symbol of a life, metaphor of an evil which "'...lives in us all... when the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks back and waits. It's something in our hearts.'" McEwan's retreat from the cement garden of his earlier books has been exemplary. Human beings are "'...just animals with clothes on...'" claims the narrator of "Last Day of Summer" (First Love, Last Rites, 1976). Black Dogs, made from kinder assumptions, is a complex statement about violence, that "disease of the human imagination". It is compassionate without resorting to sentimentality, clever without ever losing its honesty, an undisguised novel of ideas which is also his most human work. copyright TLS 1992
site optimised
for 1024x768 |
|
|
