Bernard and June Tremain’s son-in-law, discovers that it was June’s incident with the black dogs which ultimately decided the couple’s separation five years through their marriage. But as he came to know more his wife’s parents, the question of whether the black dogs were in fact real would keep surfacing in the context of the political conflagration in Europe during second world war, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the divergent socio-political beliefs of the couple, and their debates on the impact of an individual’s actions on the general milieu, the concepts of good and evil, and the importance of religious faith.
This is June Tremain’s belief: Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself – call it what you like – in the end, it’s all what we’ve got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish. My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re ever going to be at peace with each other. I’m not saying it’ll happen. There’s a good chance that it won’t. I’m saying it’s our only chance. If it does, and it could take generations, the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people of set of ideas…”
Bernard, her husband, however, brusquely brushes the view saying, “As for the inner life, try having one of those on an empty stomach. Or without clean water. Or when you’re sharing a room with seven others. Now, of course, when we all have second homes in France… You see, the way things are going on in this overcrowded planet, we do need a set of ideas, and bloody good ones too!”.
Were the black dogs real or were they representations of something else?
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