The Innocent

I'm not sure why I even have so many books by Ian McEwan in my library. I suppose he first appeared on my radar back in high school when The Cement Garden was part of a budget set of classic novels that students could order. As it was the thinnest book in the whole set it ended up on my shortlist that year (to the horror of my teacher who thought McEwan was a gimmicky hack), and despite its macabre nature it somehow resonated - enough anyway that I started picking up books from second-hand stores and fleamarkets with his name on the cover many years later. As to why so many of McEwan's books were easy to find there in the first place I never bothered to wonder.

After reading the visceral gut punch of The Innocent, on top of some of his other novels that I've read in the past, it's starting to sink in however. If there's one way McEwan really makes his mark through his novels, it has to be the way he applies his plot twists. These aren't necessarily the kinds of twists that makes you question what you've read before, maybe even provoking a re-read, eagerly drawing you in even further; instead these are the kinds of twists that explode in your face, making you forget all you've read up to that point and daring you to just throw the book in a corner - or just burn it on the spot, at that. The plot is completely derailed in a coup de grâce, the reader is suddenly thrown into the 'now' of the novel through the twist's gruesome blow to the head. If you had been engaged in a bout of passive, yet pleasant reading up till then, lulled into a sense of safety in anticipation of some more spy/romance-dealings, The Innocent forces you to evaluate the act of even bothering to push on to finish the novel from practically out of nowhere.

I'm glad I did finish the book, as there's still a good emotional payoff at the end - probably made all the more powerful after the complete destabilization of your emotional center in the preceding chapters. I'm also confident that I probably never ever want to read this one again, despite the three star rating. It could have easily been both 1 star (out of sheer disgust) or even a 4 (for the very strong visceral response it provoked), depending on your perspective. It's not at all dissimilar to how for example Naked Lunch walks the thin line between utter dreck and a brilliant milestone in literary history.

I can see why some would consider McEwan a 'gimmicky hack', as he tends to apply a variation of the same blunt force attack in every one of his novels that I've read so far. Sometimes he completely misses the mark at that (I'm looking at you, The Comfort of Strangers); sometimes it succeeds in a gloriously upsetting manner (see Atonement). Readers will all deal with the emotional provocation in their own way, and some will tune into it easier than others. I would definitely not recommend The Innocent to anyone callously however, that's for sure.

Typical McEwan fare really. A crime is committed and its ramifications play out across the years. It's well-written and gripping. If you haven't read any McEwan I'd recommend this as a good introduction to him, although it certainly isn't his finest work.

After having had a love-hate relationship with Atonement and having disliked Amsterdam, I was prepared to be disappointed going into this book. But Ian McEwan threw a googly and quite comprehensively bowled me.

This novel, set in 1955 Berlin when the Cold War had not yet intensified to the stage where the USA and USSR were continuously at each other's throat, could be called a suspense thriller. In fact, that is the mould it has been set in. But McEwan has cleverly stretched the boundaries of the genre to make it literary fiction of no little merit: a tale of star-crossed lovers that would do Shakespeare proud. (One quote in the blurb compares it to a Jacobean play, and I would say that it is not far off the mark.)

In 1955, the Berlin Wall has not yet come up. Travel between East and West Germany is still allowed, albeit with restrictions, and under a persistently growing cloud of suspicion and hostility. Leonard Marnham is a radio engineer posted in Berlin to work on the top secret CIA-MI6 collaborative project of the Berlin Tunnel (or "Operation Gold"), where America and England are planning to listen in to top secret Russian despatches by tapping on to their phone lines, through a tunnel dug under the border. The English and the Americans are uneasy allies, contemptuous of each other, and both contemptuous of the conquered Germans on whose territory they are playing out their espionage games.

Twenty-five-year-old Leo Marnham is the quintessential "innocent" - with absolutely no knowledge of anything outside his native British Isles and with zero knowledge of women. He is intimidated by the bombed-out country he is living in, the cloak-and-dagger job he is doing, as well as the American, Bob Glass, under whom he is working. Glass's easy familiarity jars upon Leo's all-too-English senses with its isolationist tendencies. Spending most of his time underground with radio equipment in back-breaking sixteen-hour shifts, his only consolation is Maria, a woman five years his senior who has taken a fancy to him.

As the days roll on, Leo gets accustomed to his routine, and his love affair with Maria develops to the point of engagement. But Maria is a woman with a troubled past - a thuggish ex-husband keeps on intruding into her life periodically, the episodes getting more and more violent, until one night things tip over the edge and the lovers awake into a nightmare. From there on, the story moves into Alfred Hitchcock territory, with a script by Stephen King.

Saying anything further would be telling! Read the book.

***

Like I said at the outset, even though this is ostensibly a thriller (and can be read as such), for the perceptive reader there are nuances. The subtle commentary on various nationalities, and how the undercurrents of their national character influence their personal relationships is a delight to behold. (One amusing example is how the Americans casually playing sports in the middle of the workplace while listening to rock shocks Leo.) Also, the "innocence" of Leo's approach to women is captured beautifully in the following passage:

She sat across from him and they warmed their hands round the big mugs. He knew from experience that unless he made a formidable effort, a pattern was waiting to impose itself: a polite enquiry would elicit a polite response and another question. Have you lived here long? Do you travel far to your work? Is it your afternoon off? The catechism would have begun. Only silences would interrupt the relentless tread of question and answer. They would be calling to each other over immense distances, from adjacent mountain peaks. Finally he would be desperate for the relief of heading away with his own thoughts, after the awkward goodbyes. Even now, they had already retreated from the intensity of their greeting. He had already asked her about tea making. One more like that, and there would be nothing he could do.

Thankfully, the experienced Maria takes the first step and relieves Leo of the responsibility here. But he almost screws up the relationship again, later, in a tragicomic episode where he tries to "take control". (That incident, leading to the first estrangement of the couple, is a not-so-subtle commentary on the chasm that separates the conqueror and the conquered.)

Ian McEwan's descriptions of people are so pictorial that one can immediately imagine them. This is Bob Glass:

He was about five-foot-six, seven inches shorter than Leonard. He seemed bottled up in his suit. He was smiling but he looked ready to wreck the room. As he sat down he slapped his knee hard and said, 'So. Welcome!' His head was also wiry and dark. It started well up on his forehead and flew backwards, giving him the high-domed appearance of a cartoon scientist facing into a strong wind. His beard, on the other hand, was inert, trapping light into its solidity. It protruded as a wedge, like the beard of a carved wooden Noah.

And Maria:

Many years later, Leonard had no difficulty at all recalling Maria's face. It shone for him, the way faces do in certain old paintings. In fact there was something almost two-dimensional about it; the hairline was high on the forehead, and at the other end of this long and perfect oval, the jaw was both delicate and forceful, so that when she tilted her head in a characteristic and endearing way, her face appeared as a disc, more of a plane than a sphere, such as a master artist might draw with an inspired stroke. The hair itself was peculiarly fine, like a baby's, and often wriggled free of the childish clasps women wore then. Her eyes were serious, though not mournful, and were green or grey, according to the light...

McEwan says that "it was the sort of face... onto which men were likely to project their own requirements." This is a key sentence in hindsight, coupled with Leo's innocence: and a harbinger of events to come.

The crucial chapter which forms the crux of the plot is a standing monument to the author's powers of description. It is a virtual mis-en-scene which can be directly filmed ; yet it is also one of the most introspective of passages, going deep into the mind of the protagonist, bordering on stream-of-consciousness. I can't say anything further without giving the plot away!

This is a satisfying read.

With Ian McEwan. Atonement remains one of my favorite books, but when I tried Saturday I just couldn't connect with the book. When I saw his book the Innocent, set in one of my favorite periods, the mid-Cold War, I just had to try it. The setting turns out to be relatively unimportant. This isn't really a Cold War thriller, but is a classic McEwan exploration of the inner life of a few people.

In this case, we have the inexperienced British civil servant, Leonard , who is sent to work on a joint US-British spy operation in mid-50s Berlin. While there he falls in love with a young German woman named Maria. This is his first love affair, and his internal monologues are perfect. Even in this relatively early novel ( 1990) he has mastered the little foibles and mental tricks we play on ourselves. The relationship between them is lovingly rendered, but this is a McEwan novel so you know something is going to go wrong, most likely horribly.

And oh does it ever. McEwan keeps you guessing as to how things will go wrong, as there are a number of characters through which catastrophe might rear its ugly head. Speaking of ugly, the book features one chapter that is flat out disturbing. McEwan shows an act, often used a joke in films and describes in grotesque, lengthly, nearly vomit inducing detail.

While that might seem gratuitous, it ties into the theme of innocence and its loss. For some characters innocence is well and truly lost after that event. But McEwan plays, not unlike William Boyd in a Good Man in Africa, on just who the Innocent in the title is. It would appear that every character is far from it, but that turns out not to be true.

Many authors can conjure up a good wistful, stare thoughtfully into the distance novel, but McEwan goes a step further by arguing, with his ending, that life, despite all its horror and our mistakes, is well worth living and there is still time to do what we must. This ties the book to Atonement as I think McEwan was saying something similar in that book.

'To innocence. And to Anglo-German co-operation.'

This is what Leonard, a stuffy English engineer who has been sent to post-war, pre-wall Berlin to assist in an attempt to tap Soviet landlines, and Maria, a mysterious German divorcee who initiates him in the art of love, say to each other at their engagement party. Just a few pages later, they lose their innocence in the most gruesome fashion imaginable, after which Anglo-German co-operation takes a back seat and confusion and paranoia take over. What ensues is one of the most filmic and vivid descriptions of a descent into nightmare in all of English literature -- eighty pages of wall-to-wall gore, horror and fatigue-induced bad decisions and betrayals, all the way to the surprise ending. It is these eighty pages which elevate what could have been a dullish spy novel into an Ian McEwan masterpiece.

For make no mistake about it, The Innocent (first published in 1990) is a McEwan masterpiece. It may stand out in his oeuvre for being a spy novel (or at least an attempt at one), but it bears all the hallmarks of the McEwan classic: a dark and twisted love story, a sexual encounter with far-reaching consequences, tremendous psychological insight, great descriptive power and a powerful sense of impending doom. Right from the get-go, one has the sense that something is going to go horribly wrong, and when it finally does around page 130 or so, the effect is startling and spell-binding. Such is the hypnotic quality of the writing in the second half of the book that I stayed up late at night to be able to finish it despite some pretty hefty jet lag. I just had to know how the story ended, and I can't think of a greater compliment to an author than that.

As a spy novel, The Innocent may disappoint fans of the genre. While there is definitely some second-guessing of the characters' identities (Maria, for instance, remains a shady character right until the last few pages), the book doesn't feature any gadgets, spectacular chases or double crosses, or other things we have come to associate with the spy novel. And while the Berlin setting and the Cold War atmosphere are well drawn (at times the mood is reminiscent of The Third Man, which is a good thing in my book), the book is less about political games and intrigue than it is about first love, the joys and hardships of making love in a cold house, sexual awakening, obsession, possessiveness and jealousy. It's a tale of love found and lost, and of innocence lost and found again (to some extent), and as such it's quite brilliant -- up there with McEwan's more famous works. If it hadn't been for the somewhat slow start and the rather pat ending, I would have given it five stars.

Well written, engrossing, unusual, sad. It would have been better without the explicitly gruesome details and the unforgivable sexual attack, both of which seemed entirely unnecessary.

il self control inglese è peggio della Guerra Fredda

Berlino metà anni 50
la città è divisa in zone di occupazione, poco prima della costruzione del Muro che la dividerà nei lunghi anni di Guerra Fredda, alcuni tecnici inglesi e americani collaborano alla costruzione di un tunnel da cui intendono spiare le comunicazioni radar provenienti dalla Russia...un povero fesso inglese, giovane e inesperto, viene mandato a far la spia senza nemmeno capire cosa dovrebbe spiare e, intanto che si guarda intorno, trova il tempo di innamorarsi di una tedesca divorziata con un marito, che non si rassegna a fare l'ex, piuttosto manesco, da cosa nasce cosa e il fesso si ingarbuglia in una storia nera, nella quale in verità finisce più trascinato che di sua propria volontà...
thriller più di fantasie che di vera e propria azione, il racconto affascina proprio per tutta l'analisi delle motivazioni del protagonista, un inglese infantile e tignoso, il quale scopre il sesso, l'amore e il potere un po' tutti insieme e finisce per cadere vittima delle sue speculazioni...

depalma should direct the film version. that terrific fucking final set piece all slowed down and stretched out over 60 pages, all gory and demented... shit yeah! i'd also like to dig up hitchcock's grave and have depalma cockslap him a few times across his pale jowly cheek. the fat bastard deserves it.