Black Dogs: Ian McEwan

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The thought that I was inflicting on her the very loss I had suffered myself intensified my loneliness". I read this book in its entirety, breathlessly, while on a 10 hour flight to US, the first I ever took.

Die Geschichte handelt von einem Waisen, der bereits in der Jugend die Eltern seiner stark pubertierenden Freunde "übernimmt" und sich von diesen als neues Objekt der Fürsorge ordentlich bemuttern läßt.

As their surname suggests, the story is a three-hander, trifurcating between Jeremy and his wife’s parents, or between rationalism, mysticism and the narrator’s argument that ‘it’s not in the business of the spirit to measure the world’. It concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980's affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society.

Men’s are bad at plot and emotional complexity but have been sufficiently influenced by the blessed Nabokov to despise the notion that protagonists must be sympathetic, or that style and big ideas are less important than empathy.An anonymous reviewer in The Observer declared Black Dogs to be McEwan's best book yet, as did Andrew Billen.