A Marriage of Inconvenience at the Library

by Bill Peak

Not too long ago, I was trying to decide what to give my nephew’s fiancée for her birthday. A professional singer songwriter, Sophia’s brilliant, beautiful, and, for one so young, uncommonly comfortable in her bones. She once seriously considered becoming a Buddhist nun. What do you give a woman who doesn’t seem to need anything at all?

Sometimes my brain reminds me of those magic 8 balls we played with as children. You would ask the thing a question, shake it, and à la the oracle at Delphi a tiny black placard with an enigmatic answer on it would float up into a small window on the 8 ball’s surface.

À la the 8 ball, a tiny black placard now floated up into my mind with the phrase “Black Dogs” inscribed on it.

I first read Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs when it came out in 1992. In those days I was rather protective of Mr. McEwan. I’d discovered him a few years earlier when his 1987 novel The Child in Time came out, and though the literati were doubtless already celebrating him, no one I knew was as yet reading the man. I thought of him as my discovery.

And, so far as I was concerned, Black Dogs confirmed my prescience.

So I bought a copy of the thing, wrapped it in gift wrapping as best I could (picture a spider’s untidily bundled prey), and shipped it off to Sophia. And, of course, as soon as I pulled out of the post office parking lot, I began to fear I’d screwed up. It had been thirty years since I read Black Dogs, what if the book wasn’t as good as I recalled.

Depending on how you define “library,” Melissa and I have three. There are the formal shelves in our living room, full of first editions, art books, and field guides; there is the library in my study—poetry, languages, a set of Britannica, and Melissa’s history texts; and there’s the paperback library in the attic—fiction, more textbooks, and a bookcase devoted to histories of early monasticism and Anglo-Saxon England.

I found my old copy of “Black Dogs” in the attic, picked it up, and soon discovered that, once again, I couldn’t put it down.

McEwan’s novel is presented as a memoir of a couple’s on again, off again, marriage. Bernard and June meet while working for British Intelligence during World War II, marry at the conclusion of that conflict, and, for their honeymoon, go on a long walking tour through northern Italy and the south of France.

As was fairly common among intellectuals in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the two of them have seen the rise of Hitler’s fascism as the natural enemy of mankind, and, consequently, become attracted to what seems fascism’s equally natural opposite, communism. Before setting out for war-torn Europe, the young idealists have taken what they think of as both a daring and exciting leap into the future: they have officially joined the Party.

But in Languedoc, toward the end of their walking tour, June has an encounter with a pair of feral hounds that utterly upends her faith in communism, to say nothing of any other –ism. It is an event that, for the rest of their lives, will haunt, trouble, and blight their marriage.

Curiously, Black Dogs is told from the point of few of the couple’s son-in-law who, orphaned at an early age, comes to think of his wife’s parents as his own. The book recounts the role he plays in trying to reconcile them to each other, and to each other’s divergent views of reality: Bernard’s materialistic and socialist, June’s entirely metaphysical.

As it happens, the son-in-law proves to be the perfect foil for both. While in Bernard’s company, he finds himself drawn to the man’s optimism, his belief that the world’s problems are caused by perfectly rational forces and, therefore, are susceptible to perfectly rational solutions. While in June’s, he is equally affected by her spirituality, the notion that he is in the presence of someone who has achieved an uncommon and otherworldly wisdom.

But he also finds their ironclad certainties maddening, the fact that neither will admit the other might not be entirely wrong.

Again and again, though, we come back to the dogs. Bernard sees the animals as representing a minor episode in his life, one that, due to his wife’s improbable obsession with the things, has driven her from him and the life they had once hoped to share. June sees them as the proof of Hamlet’s declaration that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”—though she would substitute Bernard’s name for Horatio’s.

Better than I have here, McEwan piques his readers’ interest by referring repeatedly in the book to June’s encounter with the dogs without ever actually explaining what that encounter entailed. It is only in the last forty pages of the novel that he returns us to that arid plateau in Languedoc, in the spring of 1946, to witness the event itself in a rush of writing that is as fine and evocative as any I have ever read.

It has been one of the great privileges of my life to hike in the south of France—cicadas droning in the heat, air scented with rosemary and thyme—to round a promontory and find myself looking out over a vast gorge, a gap in the mountains opposite revealing a sparkling sliver of Mediterranean Sea.

If that sounds like something you’d like to do, I recommend you take a walking tour through Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs. You’ll find it in the fiction section of the Talbot County Free Library under the call letters MCEW. Later, at the end of your day, as you sit in the shade in front of the local auberge, a glass of rosé resting on the table before you, I’d ask that you send a little book lover’s request heavenward that Sophia will enjoy the experience as much as you have.