The Innocent: A Novel

McEwan creates well the atmosphere of a post-war, pre-wall Berlin, amplifying our imaginings. The interaction between Brits and Americans is full of subtle humor, and as it later turns out, great regard and humane understanding. The narrative is smooth and concerns an everyman, virgin, British geek assigned to an American intelligence project consisting of building a tunnel crossing the border into the Russian zone to tap underground phone cables through which presumably important matters are discussed (remember, we are in 1948, almost a decade before Sputnik). Love interest and sexual education is provided by an experienced German girl to our Brit, the virgin geek. The writing is so smooth that one doesn't realize one is turning pages and reading on at a rate as if one were reading a chock-full-of-events thriller when in fact not much is really happening; the tunnel is just chugging along. But McEwan is a "smooth operator" and he is moving you along, hinting at tension, to the point you are expectant of actions or revelations in the intelligence component of the novel to pop-up any minute and throw everything topsy-turvy. Rest assured McEwan is too smart to do that. Nothing happens as such that you are aware of for three quarters of the book until our everyman, the somewhat endearing British geek is plunged into a grand guignol not of his making and totally alien to the place where you would have expected the excitement you were owed to come from.(After all, you bought the book and it was sold to you as a thriller, and after all, it takes place in thriller-city and all major protagonists except two are freeks and geeks and goons and guards mostly in uniform and with varying levels of security clearance in the intelligence services of the powers which split this city. At times it looks as if each agent has his little black book which lists the interests they are called uypon to protect, investigate, eliminate, whatever, and thus move quickly about, talk with other similar blokes and keep moving about. The Tunnel provides a country-club of sorts for those connected with the project. There are body parts indeed, but they do not come from there. So, much activity occurs in our atmospheric tunnel, yes. But nothing happens there really. The unwelcomed death occurs elsewhere, has nothing to do with Military Intelligence. The neatly wrapped body parts do not bring the Tunnel down, it's the disguise they wear. But the story does not end there. Many years later a mature, no longer virginal Brit geek comes back to Berlin, post wall, to revisit sites, and carries with him a letter explaining what precipitated events at the tunnel and freed him of any trace of guilt, if any such he held. The explication at the end of the book is clear, surprising, and truly closes the nattarive in an intelligent, satisfying way. Endearing Love, after such an unforgettable opening and the obsessive development remains my favourite McEwan novel so far. Saturday is contrived, feels Thatcherite and stacked against the lower orders. Nonetheless I appreciated the medical tracts. (It's up for a Booker). In short, I liked "The Innocent" Better.

One of my favourite writers.

How would an author explain how Germany lost its way, leading to the horrors of the National Socialist Party? One way would be to reduce that world-wide drama to a similar one between two people: one German, one British, for instance. If a reader were to follow that reductive comparison throughout McEwan’s book, he/she would be duly unsettled to observe how innocently such horrors can be carried out. Further, can seeing Germany in such a light change the international perception of that nation forever more? Or can this comparison engender forgiveness? McEwan isn’t one to shy away from asking such literary questions. The multiple layers written into The Innocent involve a German woman, Maria Eckdorf, beautiful and divorced, and an Englishman, Leonard Markham, who has experienced little of life, much less the devastation of post WWII Germany. Leonard is involved in the fictionalized true story of an attempt to burrow beneath the East-West Berlin border in order to tap Soviet phone lines. McEwan’s weaving of Markham’s and Eckdorf’s lives into this espionage adventure isn’t as much a suspense genre story as a metaphor for the fragility, the shattering of innocence. McEwan is one of those modern writers who is able to give the reader details in the extreme without making it seem like a string of information dumps. His style isn’t the American Hemingway-esque one of depicting intimate characterizations as much as it is a return to the origins of the novel. That is, an omnipresent point of view that bounces strategically between multiple characters, their activities and motivations. He does so agilely, which speaks to his gift as a writer, but this agility can be a bit overdone here in places. This is a quibble, one that hardly takes away from the author’s project in this book. it’s a dandy novel that will open a reader to many unsettling questions concerning innocence and experience. My rating: 19 of 20 stars

Like Leonard Marnham, the protagonist in this fascinating novel, we the readers are also innocent to a certain extent. And reality is slowly revealed to us until we, horrified and frightened, finally come to realize what it all truly means. This is the fourth novel of Ian McEwan's that I have read, and it is one of my favorites. It moves along slowly, but the plot thickens rapidly, building to a breathless denoument that had me wide-eyed and breathless. Leonard, an innocent both socially and sexually, is assigned to a surveillance group in post-war Berlin. Based on true events, this novel takes us literally underground in the Cold War as Leonard works on a project tunneling under the wall into the Russian sector to tap into a Russian communications center's phone lines. So much is at work in the novel -- post-war Berlin struggles to recover from the war, all the while already having been divided by super powers at conflict with one another; British and American agents, though working together, have little trust or faith in one another; Leonard's relationship with the German woman, Maria Eckdorf, is muddied by the dark secrets of Maria's past; Leonard's struggle to find a place for himself not only in the espionage effort, but also in the world at large, causes him to experience paranoia and mistrust, often at the expense of his relationships and his own self-confidence. I could not help but wonder, as I read, what was really going on, and I looked for deeper motives in every character's actions. McEwan is an excellent writer, but don't expect that he will always give you want you want. I have come to expect the unexpected from him, and this book is certainly no exception.

Ian McEwan's novels typically begin in an unsuspecting straightforward manner and gradually torpedo us to the very darkest nooks and crannies with which he is obsessed. "The Innocent" is no exception. It starts with a first-person narrative by a young British intelligence officer posted to the infamous American-Berlin sector headquarters of the Allied Forces just after World War II, where a joint USA-UK project, which really happened, was in the making just past Checkpoint Charlie. It concerned the famous underground tunnel dug so we friendlies could tap East German Stassi and Russian USSR communiques; little did we know then that almost from the beginning the project had been betrayed by England's famous MI6 mole George Blake, who, like his fellow traitors Kim Philby and Guy Burgess sold out the West for 30 pieces of silver. The book's greatest achievement is McEwan's fictional portrayal of William King Harvey's character which is not approached elsewhere, even approximately, except in Norman Mailer's erudite epic "Harlot's Ghost". Harvey, a former FBI agent, was the colorful chief of the CIA's Berlin Station. McEwan's description of what he might have been like -- we know he drank copiously and always carried two revolvers in opposing shoulder holsters -- is probably closer to the truth than we may ever know. Although alluded to in the classic "Wilderness of Mirrors" by David Martin, which McEwan acknowledges as his inspiration and source material, and also referenced in Tom Mangold's "Cold Warrior" about the CIA's witch-hunting DCI James Jesus Angleton, this perhaps is the finest guess at Harvey's true personality. What follows in the book's second half is McEwan's trademark twist-the-knife, unexpected and somewhat surreal noir darkness ... no spoilers here, comrade! Whether you are a McEwan fan -- and all of his books are superb -- or a CIA company/Farm buff, or both, don't miss this one. If only the summer 2007 TNT 3-part TV miniseries "The Company" had taken account of the books mentioned here, and others, we wouldn't have had that sad, ridiculous, disinformational take on the CIA's 1950-1970 "Golden Years". In that TV movie, Harvey for some reason is called "Harvey Territo" and although Angleton's real name is preserved, events are presented in such a convoluted, untrue manner, despite the richness of previously published material, that we have got to wonder what TNT was thinking. Perhaps George Tenet was ghost technical advisor? Forget "The Company". Read McEwan.