Hounds of hell, or perhaps not

Caroline Moore

BLACK DOGS by Ian McEwan Cape, £13.99, pp. 174 Ian McEwan has a passionately meticu- lous imagination, whose high-pressure power forces his (and our) minds to inhabit the extremities of experience, down to the last dark crevice of its minutiae. In his first collections of stories, this remarkable talent was used apparently for no higher purpose than to make our flesh creep. McEwan territory seemed hounded by child-murder, adolescent perversions, necrophilia and incest. And elements of horribly detailed horror remain in his later work: every read- er of The Innocent is made to realise exactly how difficult it is to make the first incision with a saw upon a dead body.

Even in the earliest tales there is much more than mere fat-boy ghoulishness, how- ever. There is paradoxically immense ten- derness for his characters, particularly the children and adolescents. If they are often and horribly victimised it is not because McEwan hates them, but because he feels a fiercely protective fit of passion: the stories strike a nerve precisely because they are like the fond and wayward thoughts that slide into every mother's head when her child is late home CO my God, what if . .. '). Even his perverts and murderers arc often portrayed from within as with- drawn misfits: the fears he draws on are adolescent ones (what if I never have sex/escape from my mother . .. ) Such compassion, of course, serves the ends of the horror story: to be inside the skin of both victim and murderer guarantees gooseflesh.

In his novels, however, the horror is gradually displaced by the tenderness. The Comfort of Strangers and The Innocent have their murders, but the main interest is in the intense and mutable relationship between lovers. In The Child in Time, McEwan's finest book, the 'crime' is blood- less and unsolved: a child disappears forever in a supermarket, that most simple and chilling parental 'what if ... '

The McEwan who celebrates marriage and hymns parenthood seems a far cry from the louche and squalid adolescent persona which McEwan deployed so often and effectively. Black Dogs begins by sug- gesting a link between the two: the child in McEwan's work is always father to the man. The novel opens with an explanation of the narrator's adolescent fascination with stability, security and maturity.

Ever since I lost mine in a road accident when I was eight, I have had my eye on other people's parents.

At an age when most adolescents fanta- sise about the advantages of abiogenesis, Jeremy moves in on the parents of his friends, like an ingratiating 'six-foot cuckoo'. They welcome a surrogate son who appreciates their jokes, advice, food and discussions of Proust; meanwhile, of course, their real offspring covet the 'freezing squalor' of Jeremy's home-life with his Jean Harlow look-alike sister, whose gin-swilling, sado-masochistic marriage to a leather feticheur seems to them the last word in sophistication. At the same time as he seeks surrogate parents, Jeremy tries to become one to his neglect- ed and abused niece:

When I looked up from my work and saw Sally behind me in the darkening room, on her hack, sheets and teddies pushed down below her knees, arms and legs flung wide, in what I took to he an attitude of completely misguided trust in the benevolence of her world, I was elated by a wild and painful pro- tectiveness, a stab in the heart ...

But the pathetic 'cuckoo' is benign; his 'affair of the heart' with Sally, despite the hint of sexual abandon in her attitude, is

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'Know any riddles?'

innocently responsible. A set-up which in early McEwan would be milked for exotic shocks is unexploited: it is Jean and her brutal husband who abuse Sally.

Evil in this book is more mundane, but no less ugly than in the earlier books: mindless neo-Nazi thugs looking for trou- ble during the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall; a French couple in a restaurant brutally lamming into their child for a breach of table manners. Only the vividly realised central episode — an encounter with Satanic hounds in a gorge in Provence — retains a gothic element. The precise details are saved for the end, as a sort of mauvaise bouche, so it would not do to reveal them; but it is typical of the novel that the most outré and nasty possibility in the encounter may be the invention of drunken peasants. The precise status of the dogs, whether

a potent symbol, a handy catch-phrase, evidence of ... credulity, or a manifestation of a power that really exists

is open to question.

Questioning, indeed, is the staple of this book. The Narrator has been left with a habit of slithering unbelief which lacks even the toughness of settled scepticism. With his marriage ('Love set me going'), Jeremy acquires parents at last, June and Bernard. They have beliefs enough to spare, starting at first with a shared post- war faith in communism; but incompatible creeds and casts of mind have driven them apart. Much of the book is a reconstruction of the disintegration of their marriage, a portrait of two generous but narrow- minded idealists, who cannot live together, but whose lives apart are ruined. The turn- ing point in their relationship and her life, according to June, was her encounter upon a mountain path with incarnate Evil in the form of two black dogs. Bernard, however, has his own version.

This is not McEwan's best book (though The Child in Time is so good that. this is praising with faint damns). The opposition between June and Bernard is a trifle too symmetrical, a dialectic between

rationalist and mystic, comissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuition- ist.

Our insight into their incompatibility hard- ly advances beyond this summing up on p. 19. But the book is kept alive by its adroit use of shifting perspectives, and its doubling back through time for multiple reconstructions, which vividly illustrate McEwan's thesis that our point of view alters the very way we see, feel and remem- ber 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 dis- appear into the foothills of Europe like 'black stains in a grey dawn', could take any form to reappear.