Black Dogs

I've been afraid of dogs. My first bad experience with one was, in my memory (which will need forgiveness to be sure), whitish and about the size and look of a lab. I was four and he came up to my nose. He knocked me over when he ran at me. My mom ran him over, accidentally, on the way home from a church meeting. I was in the back of the car at the time. I remember this because of the relief of having that fear eliminated from my life. The next bad dog experience was, and this is a bit embarrassing, as a paper boy collecting fees from a customer who had a small dog. When I knocked on the door Sputnik, about one foot high, lived up to his name and got me by the ankle. I stifled tears, took the apologies and the money, and never collected

there again. I was ten.

The first few years of bike commuting out here featured the added peril of a rottweiler named Samson. He made me mad, but my fear was, I think, warranted. He was huge and once when I stopped to talk to the owner he put his paws on my shoulders and licked me like a lover. I think he was getting a taste. Every few rides I'd be heading into the wind and he could keep up with me. Then he'd stay right my pedals. I had the feeling he was just waiting for the right time. The closest he came was one time when he came across the road and angled right at my front wheel. I braked to avoid him, and then stood on the pedals to save my life. These kinds of memories mark you, because you believe at the time that a great deal is at stake, perhaps everything.

The events of Ian McEwan's novel centre around the narrator's mother-in-law June's encounter on a mountain path with two black dogs. She was on her honeymoon. Her husband is a few hundred yards behind her on the path tying his shoes. This is not his betrayal. His unwillingness to accept the gravity of the event for her becomes the black dog in their relationship. They love each other, but their reactions to the circumstances surrounding this event, and their memories of it, thwarts their ability to live together for as long as they'd dreamed.

A story like this is difficult to tell, without it becoming maudlin. McEwan's choice is to have the son-in-law narrate the story of his attempt to understand the demise of his wife's parent's marriage. This neutral point of view allows us to see and hear both sides of the story. It become idealogical as well, mixing in cold war politics and British communist idealism. I'm not convinced that t,his topical framing of the story is necessary, though I expect the intent is to show how the metaphor of black dogs extend to international politics. So how does post-ww2 encounter along the cold war mountain path form international relations today? McEwan may have imagined, when he wrote the novel (just after the fall of the Berlin Wall), that the black dogs of these years would lurk and poison us well into the future.

I find the small-scale human story most compelling, and the attempt to contextualize them in the large-scale international situation actually diminishes the simple and profound fact that happenings over which we have no control can become black dogs for us.

Still, the effects of memory is the point of the novel. From memory we reproduce our black dogs, no matter how true to the actual experience, daily. If we can't get a hold of them, and manage them, they're going to dominate us. They may keep us apart from one another.