3.25|5

This is a weird little story. Not too much is happening, the characters are none too likable, one almost rape scene that really… what was the point of? A short book but felt like months going through it probably because it literally took me the second half of the year to finish it. I don’t see who I can recommend it to or really, at the end of the day, its point.

Far less than my expectations, Schade ! nevertheless it's acceptable as a love story that has nothing to do deeply with the beginning of the cold war or the kind of life in Berlin just after the war. therefrom I classify it as a love story , even though the central theme is on spy. This is because I've been and will be obsessed with knowing more about the nature of the life Berliners were living during that period of time, and thought this novel would introduce something new but, unfortunately, did not satisfy what I want!

4.5 stars. A very engaging, well written, suspenseful novel about Leonard Markham, a 25 year old Englishman who was in Berlin in 1955, employed by the British Government in spying with the Americans, on the Russians. His job required him to work in a tunnel using equipment to intercept Russian transmissions.

Leonard meets and falls in love with a German woman, Maria, who is a 31 divorcee. Their relationship blossoms. However Maria’s ex husband, Otto, usually invades Maria’s apartment a couple of times a year, intimidating Maria and hitting her.

There are a couple of surprising plot twists and good plot resolution.

I have read a number of McEwan’s novels and found this novel as good as some his best works including ‘Atonement’, ‘The Children Act’ and ‘Saturday’.

McEwan fans should find this novel an enjoyable, entertaining reading experience.

I read this in a single day, but think it will have a long-lasting impact nevertheless. Very cleverly built with a great number of touchingly accurate observations about human nature and people's internal lives, the 1950s setting of Berlin was brought to live with all the post-warn tensions and political machinations of the time. It drew me in, and the first three quarters felt more of a character/situation study than a drama.

The last quarter of the story was very dramatic and unexpected indeed, and perhaps (like 'The Cement Garden') for me it knocked me a little off-kilter. It's not indicative of anything wrong with McEwan's work, he remains one of the authors who I most admire, but I perhaps prefer those novels and stories he has written with which I find the most common ground. The twists which came to a head here in the last hundred pages pulled me a bit further away from the characters who I had been getting to know up till then. I may re-read it and get even more from the experience.

As usual McEwan fails to disappoint! A gripping story that escalates cleverly to a horrific climax and ends where you never expect to be left. Genius.

**SPOILERS**

One of my 2014 challenge categories is Berlin. I wanted to read books set in Berlin, but not set during WWII. I was especially interested in Cold War Berlin, reconstruction, that sort of thing. The Innocent started off as a book about British/American collaboration on a project - essentially spying on the Russians. The main character, Leonard, is a young British man who has come to Berlin to help with the electronics part of the project and the entire story is told from his point of view. I liked it well enough, until it was hijacked by Leonard's falling in love which begins his improbable love story. I sort of got used to it, but was then rudely interrupted by Leonard's "I am the conqueror" rape fantasy scene, after which he must grovel in order to gain forgiveness. The love story temporarily gets back on track but is once again derailed by a grisly, if accidental, murder. We are then instructed graphically on how (or how not) to hack up a body in order to hide it in a couple of suitcases. Then the American gets involved and saves the day. Well written and full of innuendo, clever, but a bit much for my taste.

I wish I knew what this 1990 novel was trying to be, because as well written as the prose is, The Innocent feels all over the place. It’s a post-WWII Berlin spy novel, but it’s mostly about politics – not so much between the Russians and the west, but between Germany, the Americans, and the British. It’s also a coming-of-age story, in a way; though the protagonist is 30, he’s still a bit naïve. Finally, there are small turns in the plot that seem unlikely and then seriously improbable, and filled with unnecessarily detailed gore. Yet I have to concede that McEwan is an engaging, easy-to-read author.

1955: Leo is an English engineer. He’s sent to Berlin to work on and American/English project of digging under the Berlin Wall to tap into Russian phone lines. As a technician, Leo wires the recording devices. The Americans have a system for decoding secret Communist messages, and Leo is also sent to find out what he can about their methods. While in Berlin on this project, he meets Maria, a beautiful German divorcee with a violent, drunk ex-husband. Leo gets embroiled in romance and love, yadda yadda yadda, etc.

Part of this feels light and satirical, the stuff that Evelyn Waugh turned out early in his career. Yet I’m not sure McEwan has much new or comical to say about American/British relationships, the Cold War, or post-war Berlin. He does a lovely job at describing environments – I could draw a map after his prose. However, his characters are slightly flatter, a bit more like caricatures. Where they go, how they change – their arcs – seem a bit on the far-fetched side.

Other parts of the book, as I’ve said, are supremely macabre and gross. My biggest problem was that certain elements of the plot and of this gore seemed introduced to give the story somewhere to go. In the end, the plot is unexpected, but in a ridiculous, unbelievable way – as if Clive Barker or Stephen King took over a dull espionage story that wasn’t going anywhere on its own.

McEwan, however, does avoid going to typical Mata Hari areas, as he does also steer clear of obvious spy-versus-spy twists. However, in missing these potholes, his somewhat-satirical novel goes to gore and silliness – not the most interesting place to go, unexpected, but also a bit off-kilter.

I have to give McEwan credit for his wonderful ease of writing, but I’m looking forward to Atonement and his other later novels with a feeling he probably got way better than this plot, with more detailed character changes.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan is a psychological thriller set in West Berlin, 1954, during the cold war. Leonard Marnham, a 25-year-old British post office technician, was employed by the Americans on a joint British-American surveillance project to install signals in the tunnel they were building to tap the phone lines of the Soviet High Command.

Leonard was well brought up and shy but quickly lost both his physical and political innocence. His love interest was a blond German divorcee, Maria Eckdorf, whom he met at a pub. McEwan expertly captured the intimate nuances of a courting couple’s interactions. Leonard’s monotonous days of working in a high security claustrophobic office were sweetly relieved by the times he was able to spend in Maria’s company. Then inexplicably, the previously naive Leonard turned physically abusive to Maria and I recoiled in disgust. I saw no purpose in this unprecipitated and shocking descent into a vile psychological landscape. It smacked of perversity, which took me right back to the revulsion I had felt towards McEwan’s earliest work, “First Love, Last Rites”.

The first half of the novel was beginning to plod with details of the secrecy surrounding the tunneling project. Then entered Otto, Maria’s drunken ex-husband, the McEwan malevolent intruder, and that was when the story shifted to an intense, high gear. I was even more repulsed. But the gore was so horrific I kept on reading. Perhaps, this is where McEwan succeeds as a writer in his power to drag the reader unwittingly into his story kicking and screaming through the macabre treatment he unleashes with pleasure. Leonard landed himself in a very dangerous situation; his cover was soon to be blown and his crime revealed. Then with consummate skill, McEwan brought credible closure to an incredible plot. The Innocent is a good read but best before a meal.

https://serserikuslar.blogspot.com/20...

This novel is exceptional.

It is rare that a sentimental novel can make a contemporary reader feel covetous of the experience he has had with it, but The Innocent does just that.

As a reader, one knows what McEwan is doing and what he is going to do. When he wishes to work a reader over, he puts the novel deep in the modern past, makes his transitions abrupt and then finishes the story with reminiscences from a present-day character.

In this way, The Innocent is very similar to the formula McEwan followed in Atonement. The main difference was that McEwan's protagonist was more enjoyable and more fun to make acquaintance with in The Innocent.

Oddly, although the Leonard character and the Maria character are the innocent ones in the novel, it is an Englishman's reflections on Americans that causes the title. It is post-WWII Americans who are considered the innocents.

This novel does not set out to be a political novel, but is masterful in its use of politics to enhance the story. This novel is also evidence that great writers are at work today.

Ian McEwan understands himself and stays within his limitations perfectly in this novel. He even shows mercy to the reader at the end:

When he could make ruin of his reader's emotional state by making Leonard a lonely, childless man through the rest of his life, McEwan does not do this. Neither does he deny it. He allows it to resonate through the final twenty-five pages, some of the saddest pages I can remember reading.

This is an artist doing with his audience exactly as he set out to do. This is as good as contemporary fiction gets.

"Ahora que era capaz de hablar de la niebla en que se había movido, al fin se hacía visible para él."

Inocente más bien poco; pánfilo, ingenuo, virgen y desorientado; un técnico en el Berlín de comienzos de la Guerra Fría, pleno de secretos, de esos secretos fruto y raíz de nuestra humanidad que nos hacen y deshacen en función de la decisiones que vamos tomando según encontramos topetazos en el camino. La técnica parece previa a la electrónica en esos años de Rock around the clock y Heartbreak hotel que hacen sentirse libre a nuestro protagonista. Hay varios pasajes descriptivos de los aspectos materiales de esa Operación Oro que a mí juicio lastran esta novela de las primeras de este brillante escritor y que tal vez (y al hilo de la cita inaugural de La madriguera) dan pie a calificarla de kafkiana, igual por lo tedioso de ese túnel abocado al fracaso y que Leonard llega a sentir como su hogar: el tratamiento de la acción es irreal, absurdo, cercano a la parodia en esa escena con la sierra y la subsiguiente de las maletas, mas propio y acertado en la educación sentimental de ese bisoño protagonista al que concedemos una segunda oportunidad, una vuelta al escenario treinta y dos años después, ya más maduro, más informado.

No es de lo mejor que podemos leer de McEwan para mi gusto: las escenas chocantes están ahí, y las revelaciones, y los personajes ricos y ambiguos, pero encuentro el lenguaje un tanto contenido de más, quizás temeroso o inseguro, evocador a medias, como ese paseo a la última parada del tranvía que puede llegar a ser cualquier cosa o convertirse en tierra de nadie.

"Tal vez esperaba que estuviera cerrada con llave y fuera aquél, por tanto, uno de esos pequeños actos sin sentido de los que está llena la vida cotidiana."

"¿qué ocurre cuando alguien se va solo para tener un momento de intimidad? Cuando ve venir un leopardo, sabe algo que los otros no saben. Tiene algo que ellos no tienen, tiene un secreto, y éste es el comienzo de su individualidad, de su conciencia. Si quiere compartir su secreto y correr por el sendero para advertir a los otros, entonces va a tener que inventar el lenguaje. De ahí nace la posibilidad de la cultura. También puede quedarse quieto y confiar en que el leopardo se coma al jefe que tanto le está incordiando. Un plan secreto, eso supone más individuación, más conciencia."

"Había figuras que primero se congregaban al borde de su pensamiento, pero que ahora avanzaban hacia el centro, hacia él. Todas eran versiones de sí mismo y sabía que no podría resistirse a ellas."

"en aquel espacio cerrado e íntimo, aprendió a amar los olores: el del sudor, como de hierba recién segada, y el de la secreción que desprendía Maria al excitarse, que constaba de dos elementos, áspero y a la vez suave, picante y dulce, fruta y queso, los mismísimos sabores del deseo."

Unlikeable characters, hideously graphic violence and all hung off the true story of George Blake's Berlin tunnel. What I would describe as unnecessary and revolting padding.