running down the path into the Gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones . The main characters travel to France, where they encounter disturbing residues of Nazism still at large in the French countryside. Poet Craig Raine billed it as "a novel whose formal perfection was so subtle that most critics failed to notice.

Only after a while you notice that it's not the author, but the main character who does the speaking. For example, almost losing touch with a young relative because "I could not bear to undergo another parting from X. It is richly packed with ideas and character into what is almost only a novella in length, and I found the ending to be particularly strong and well prepared by what had gone before. In the end, everything clears up like a fog, making you see more clearly what you perhaps intuited all along, about who was right and who was aloof. June's encounter with two black dogs in a rocky gorge is mentioned throughout the book, but it is only fully explained at the end.

The liturgy at a funeral was "a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine". In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civilisation's darkest moods - its black dogs - with the tensions that both create love and destroy it. However, they both firmly believe that communism can make the world better, and through devotion to the communist cause they can ultimately help shape society into a utopia.

A fairly interesting read, most similar in his oeuvre (at least of the 15 I’ve read so far) to The Child in Time. Still, this hooks you in and it makes everything so relatable that it's hard not to become engrossed in the story. I read this book in its entirety, breathlessly, while on a 10 hour flight to US, the first I ever took. He learns that Bernard and June were devoted members of the British Communist Party in the late-1940s. It is similar, for this novel is like fragmented dreams, and because those black dogs are black stains in the grey of the dawn.Perhaps related to that, Jeremy is very conscious of one generation repeating the faults of a previous one, though he sometimes uses that as a convenient excuse.