Ian McEwan - Black Dogs

IAN McEWAN

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London

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781409089957

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Vintage 1998

18 20 19 17

Copyright Ian McEwan 1992

Ian McEwan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Jonathan Cape

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ISBN 9780099277088

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TO JON COOK, WHO
SAW THEM TOO

In these times I dont, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I dont want what I know and want what I dont know.

MARSILIO FICINO,
letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, c. 1475

BLACK DOGS

Ian McEwan has written two collections of stories, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, and eleven novels, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday and On Chesil Beach. He won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998.

ALSO BY IAN McEWAN

First Love, Last Rites

In Between the Sheets

The Cement Garden

The Comfort of Strangers

The Child in Time

The Innocent

The Daydreamer

Enduring Love

Amsterdam

Atonement

Saturday

On Chesil Beach

Black Dogs is cinematic in scope ... McEwans insights rise like vapours from the crater of history

The Times

The book is kept alive by its adroit use of shifting perspectives, and its doubling back through time for multiple reconstructions, which vividly illustrate McEwans thesis that our point of view alters the very way we see, feel and remember events. Here, his old skill for getting inside the skins of his characters serves him as well as ever. The book richly suggests our human potentialities for mere waste as well as sheer evil, and for a sort of imperilled happiness; the dogs, which disappear into the foothills of Europe like black stains in a grey dawn, could take any form to reappear

Spectator

Quivering with an almost ESP alertness to the different ways in which human beings can be damaged, Black Dogs pads masterfully around territory Ian McEwan has long marked out as his own ... acutely conscious of lifes ability to injure the helpless, he wholeheartedly empathises with the menaced victim against the panting predators ... a further testament to one of recent fictions most remarkable regenerations ... McEwans transformation ... to a novelist unsurpassed for his responsive, responsible humanity

Sunday Times

A chilling parable for our times

The Scotsman

A powerful, strangely unforgettable book ... about the existence of evil and whether it can be defeated by rational action

Sunday Telegraph

Leisurely and expansive meditation on the nature of good and evil, the moral limits of political reform and religious belief, the intoxications of violence and the redemptive power of love in less that a hundred and fifty pages, and without a trace of pretension or a moment of tedium. This is a brilliant book

New Yorker

NOTE:

The places mentioned in this novel correspond to actual French villages, but the characters associated with them are entirely fictional and bear no resemblance to persons living or dead. The Maires story and the Maire himself have no basis in historical fact.

I.M.

E VER SINCE I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I have had my eye on other peoples parents. This was particularly true during my teens when many of my friends were casting off their own folk, and I did rather well in a lonely, hand-me-down way. In our neighbourhood there was no shortage of faintly dejected fathers and mothers only too happy to have at least one seventeen-year-old around to appreciate their jokes, advice, cooking, even their money. At the same time I was something of a parent myself. My immediate milieu in those days was the new and disintegrating marriage of my sister Jean to a man called Harper. My protge and intimate in this unhappy household was my three-year-old niece, Sally, Jeans only child. The rages and reconciliations that surged up and down the big apartment Jean had inherited half the estate; my half was held in trust tended to sweep Sally aside. Naturally, I identified with an abandoned child and so we holed up nicely from time to time in a large room overlooking the garden with her toys and my records, and a tiny kitchen we used whenever the savagery beyond made us not want to show our faces.

Looking after her was good for me. It kept me civilised and away from my own problems. Another two decades were to pass before I felt as rooted as I did then. Most of all I enjoyed the evenings when Jean and Harper were out, particularly in the summer when I would read to Sally until she fell asleep, and later do my homework on the big table by the open french windows, facing out to the sweet smell of scented stock and traffic dust. I was studying for A levels at The Beamish on Elgin Crescent, a crammer which liked to call itself an academy. When I looked up from my work and saw Sally behind me in the darkening room, on her back, sheets and teddies pushed down below her knees, arms and legs flung wide, in what I took to be an attitude of completely misguided trust in the benevolence of her world, I was elated by a wild and painful protectiveness, a stab in the heart, and I am sure it was for this I have had four children of my own. I never had any doubts about it; at some level you remain an orphan for life; looking after children is one way of looking after yourself.

Unpredictably, Jean would burst in on us, powered by guilt or by a surplus of love from making peace with Harper, and she would bear Sally away to their end of the apartment with coos and hugs and worthless promises. That was when the blackness, the hollow feeling of unbelonging, was likely to come down. Rather than skulk about, or watch TV like other kids, I would slope off into the night, down Ladbroke Grove, to the household currently warmest to me. The images that come to mind after more than twenty-five years are of pale, stuccoed mansions, some peeling, others immaculate, Powis Square perhaps, and a rich yellow light from the open front door revealing in the darkness a white-faced adolescent, already six feet tall, shuffling inside his Chelsea boots. Oh, good evening Mrs Langley. Sorry to trouble you. Is Toby in?