In one town, every person they meet is mourning the death of a family member, and all the villagers are too shell-shocked to even notice when the Red Cross volunteers arrive and when they leave.

He seems to take a single kernel of a good idea, and fill in a story around it, adding characters and descriptions of histories and motivations, but all of it feels like mere scaffolding for the central event. In this novel you see the normal movement he regularly creates by having a person move in space, but here there is also an almost palpable ephemeral vibration. It comes in the movement of history, in the visceral experience of mass grief, and, central to this book, to the movement of the heart versus its shadow: pure evil.After June’s death, Jeremy takes Bernard to Berlin (Part Two) to soak up the atmosphere just after the Wall comes down, but the elderly man is kicked by a skinhead. While these on the one hand allowing for a deeper exploration of specific time periods and political events, for example, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, they seem, on the other, to skew the balance of importance that these events might have for the essence of the novel. Black Dogs" is a strange combination of the early McEwan and the later McEwan, not that the two are ultimately separated by more than the author's age and the benefit of hindsight. An understated yet as a whole quite potent tale that looks at the power that can be exerted by an exposure to evil and also of how differing personal ideologies can impact on loving human relationships.

However, they are never as close as they were before their honeymoon, and June soon takes the three children and leaves Bernard to move to France.

Jeremy speaks to Bernard and June separately: he interviews Bernard during a 1989 trip to Berlin to celebrate the fall of Communism; he talks to June as she lies in a nursing home, reassessing her life. Este libro habla sobre ese momento de revelación en que un ser humano se cuestiona las convicciones que lo definían y transformaban, a las que defendía y a las cuales se aferraba, para dar lugar a algo nuevo y distinto, aunque no necesariamente más acertado que lo anterior. Even a clever twist in genre fiction usually feels slightly cheap, but McEwan is so graceful with his writing that it damn near always works. Poet Craig Raine billed it as "a novel whose formal perfection was so subtle that most critics failed to notice.

Both were communists, but as a result of an encounter with two black dogs, June converts to religion, and the couple becomes estranged. The moment when June and Bernard realized the differences in their beliefs came during their honeymoon in 1946, on a walking tour of the barren Cévennes mountains in the South of France.Depression is never really addressed, which is odd, given the title: the book even mentions that "the black dog" was how Churchill personified his depressive episodes.