A young woman is shaken in her understanding of who she is and what she wants. The walking holiday she and her husband have planned now seems, Ian McEwan says, ‘a pointless detour from her uncertainty’. The phrase is full of trouble, of precise and elusive implications. Uncertainty is a path, a destination, a need. Of course we may not like the thought, and many of us will prefer to see our detours as chosen directions, uncertainty as something to be shaken off rather than returned to. But truths can often be measured by the urgency of our desire to avoid them, and sometimes only by that.

What’s striking about McEwan’s later work – I’m thinking particularly of The Innocent, Black Dogs and his new novel Enduring Love – is its intimacy with evasion and failure, combined with an alert intelligence about these things which itself looks like grounds for hope. McEwan’s characters talk past each other, go manic, stumble into violence, cultivate suspicions, hide behind brilliant illusions. They probably can’t help or save themselves, or not many of them can, but it’s hard to believe that such patient and delicate understanding of their condition won’t help someone.

Jeremy, the narrator of Black Dogs, is writing a memoir about his wife’s parents, Bernard and June, ex-Communists who took off in opposite directions, towards emphatic rationality and passionate faith. They can’t live with each other and can’t stop thinking about each other, feeding greedily off hearsay, fuelling their favourite myths. They seem deluded, but their problem is more subtle and more desperate. They don’t know what to do with their lucidity, and have to keep running from it. Bernard thinks June in her religion is just as ‘absolutist’ as the Communists they left behind. ‘Politico or priestess, it didn’t matter, in essence she was a hardliner.’ Then he says, in answer to a question from Jeremy: ‘She was one of the few people I know who saw her life as a project, an undertaking ... I hated the nonsense she filled her head with, but I loved her seriousness.’

June for her part is convinced, in old age, that her ‘biggest single failure’ was to imagine that a good life could be made alone, and that her disagreements with Bernard mattered more than their love.