Skip to main content

Black dogs and other imagined realities

I’ve just finished my second Ian McEwan book in a row, and my fifth overall. I’m sure this happens with many of us, that we find ourselves caught up with a writer we enjoy and whose work engages us in a deep, intimate way, and we are loath to leave. We immerse ourselves in book after book and just do not want to part company. The book I just finished is “Black Dogs” and the one just before was “Enduring Love”. For anyone who has read Ian McEwan, you would sense a certain comforting sameness across his writing—not a boring, tedious sameness, but a common thread of deeply felt humanity (and perhaps many writers have this) that is at once despairing and hopeful. There’s a recognition of a core of evil and ugliness that runs through all individuals, and it is in overcoming this or confronting it with the goodness that also runs through us that a story emerges. It’s also the specificity with which large-scale events affect each one of us, and changes our lives, forever.

Take, for instance, this extract:

“As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores, whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions…each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise…. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths,… which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories….. what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”

(Black Dogs, Vintage, 1998, p.165)

All novelists capture our minds and hearts with something that is universal, yet particular, in a way that we are able to become part of the story, a fly on the wall, feeling everything that every character is feeling:

If one ever wanted proof of Darwin’s contention that the many expressions of emotion in humans are universal, genetically inscribed, then a few minutes by the arrivals gate in Heathrow’s Terminal Four should suffice. I saw the same joy, the same uncontrollable smile, in the faces of a Nigerian earth mama, a thin-lipped Scottish grany and a pale, correct Japanese businessman as they wheeled their trolleys in and recognized a figure in the expectant crowd…. I kept hearing the same signing sound on a downward note, often breathed through a name as two people pressed forward to go into their embrace.

(Enduring Love, Vintage, 2004, p. 4)

That one reminded me of my own private drama at an airport, one of those unforgettable cinematic scenes that one goes back to time and again. 1993, October 20. Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. Three days before my younger daughter turned two and my older one, four. I had been in the US for a little under two months, and my husband and children were arriving from India to join me. I had not seen my little girls for almost two months. We arrived at the airport, my friend Ganesh and I, a little early as may be expected, for anxious parents who have not seen their children for a while! Finally, after what seems to be an interminable wait, the glass doors slide open and people, tired, travel worn, unsure, expectant, begin walking through into the arrivals area. It is a good five minutes before we spot them, an adult pushing a trolley with one hand and holding a sleepy but wide-eyed toddler on the other arm, and a little blue-frocked pony-tailed girl, my four-year-old Achala hanging on to his tee shirt by the side. Then she sees me, and in an instant, catapults through the doorway, straight into my arms, the stuffed animal she had been clutching forgotten and on the floor. Six weeks or more melted away and we were together again.

It took a little longer for two-year-old Ananya…she refused to recognize me, perhaps punishing me for having left without her, so there was no “arrival” for her, only a transition from one comfortable, familiar space, to another that took some time to become home.

But back to McEwan and his writing. Atonement showed us how, one person’s mistaken perception and subsequent action could tear apart lives, while Saturday takes us on a minutely experienced 24 hours culminating in a dramatic event that again, breaks down the ordinariness of our everydays, and Chesil Beach places under the microscope one evening in two lifetimes, one which changes their directions forever.

These are the book’s I’ve read. And I’m looking forward to the others….

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A house called Ayodhya

How do words get taken away from you? How do they mutate and reconfigure around entirely new meanings, only weakly related to those that they held when you owned them? And then, through repetition and constant association, they solidify into these new forms, their other histories hidden behind impenetrable layers, where they have not been erased altogether.   I live in a house whose name often elicits a curious look, raised eyebrow, a muffled cough, a judging eye, or even a vigorous nod of approval. But for even the least politically minded, the name is evocative of something. For some of us, it is the wave of negativity, divisiveness, and violence unleashed by the events of a December three decades ago. For others, it may represent the righteous assertion of identity.   But the name etched into the gate pillar, now fading and diminished when compared to the glitzy lettering on neighbouring walls, has nothing to do with the politics of place and claimed heritage. It is a simpl...

Remembering Ja

Ja (right) with Maxine, at the Alternative Network meeting, 2004 I opened the newspaper this morning and way down at the bottom of page five was a small insert in remembrance of an old friend and sometime mentor, Janaki Iyer, known simply as "Ja" to many of us.  I myself took a decade or more to make the transition from "Mrs Iyer" to "Janaki" to a very hesitant "Ja"--the diminutive seemed not to do justice to a woman who in a very gentle and quiet way had touched so many people, young, old, and like myself, somewhere in between. First, the specifics. Janaki was a teacher from start to finish. After many years of teaching in an upscale Bombay school, she moved to Hyderabad and, with an enthusiastic friend, started Ananda Bharati, a learning space for children of migrant labourers, in a small room in the YMCA, Tarnaka. Many of those children went on to join the mainstream school system and complete their secondary education; a few even obtai...

Talking about Talk: a conversation with Sherry Turkle

Credit: CNN Image s The Tang Building sits on the southern edge of the MIT campus, overlooking the river whose grey this autumn afternoon acts as a foil to the gold and auburn of the trees across its wide span. I rush up the stairs to the second floor—I am a minute past the appointed hour—and arrive, just a little out of breath, on the second floor. The corridor is dark and the roomy lobby leading to the room that bears the number I’ve been given is even darker. I check my phone again to make sure I have it right and then venture inside, flipping the light switch and finding a spot on a comfortable sofa. One never feels quite prepared for an interview. Especially when it involves someone who has already been in the media eye over the years, whose engaging commentaries on life in the digital age have found their way to the TED stage and from there into millions of YouTube and Facebook shares, whose books straddle the academic and popular; someone who could be the Nora Ephron ...