More than one black dog

We drove to Wattamolla beach in the Royal National Park on a lazy, hot day.  Ants feasted on us as we tried our best to enjoy our cheese and tomato sanwiches, fruit and Green & Black's organic chocalate.  Spike had a swim in the lagoon.  She described the water as cool.  That may have been a euphemism for "Jeezus, it's cold!".

 

I read all afternoon, finishing Black Dogs by Ian McEwan.  Now there is a disappointing novel.  I had hoped for more.  The praise for the book printed on its cover is hyperbolic.  That seems like a polite way of saying what I mean.   

It’s a slim volume, which is not necessarily a bad thing but there isn’t much you’d want to hang on to from its 200 or so pages.  The principal characters – Bernard and is it June – were (to my sensibility at least) two-dimensional, cardboard cut-out figures.  The passionate intensity upon which their relationship was supposed to be based was not at all apparent from the text so I wasn’t entirely sure why I was reading a tale about how June had felt terrorised by two dogs (which may ort may not have trained by Nazis to rape prisoners) to such a degree that she converted to God from Communism during the one brief (I’ve no doubt scary) encounter in France.  That lead to them altering their route on the next country walk.  They bumped into a shepherd who took them to an empty house which June decided they must buy and there she spent most of her life estranged from her husband who ended up as a Labour MP.  I understand that the viscous, black hunting dogs roaming free across a newly pacified post-world-war France may have had a symbolic, even allegorical and / or prophetic significance but Christ it’s a tedious read about not very pleasant but not entirely unpleasant people to whom nothing very dramatic happens.  Sorry Ian.
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