The Innocent by Ian McEwan

I finished this novel at the beginning of the week but have only just found the time to write a post about it.

McEwan is a frustrating writer. He's got a hefty reputation as one of Britain's foremost contemporary authors but if you Google him or read some of the comments by general readers on his work on culture websites, a huge number of people seem to loathe him. My first contact with his work was when I read Atonement several years ago and thought it was astonishingly good. Since then I've read most of his novels (one or two a year) and have had mixed reactions: Amsterdam, which bizarrely won McEwan the 1998 Booker prize, is an extremely slight, mediocre work; the recent novella On Chesil Beach is, in my opinion, a small masterpiece of prose. So I always approach his work with trepidation, but have read so much of it now that I feel I might as well keep going for the sake of completion.

The Innocent is McEwan's fourth novel, first published in 1990. I knew that the setting was Cold War Berlin and that it was some sort of spy story, but assumed that it was set around the time it was written (i.e. around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall). I was quite surprised upon starting it to find it's set in the mid-Fifties, when the city of Berlin was still divided into different spheres of control (British, American, French and not forgetting Russian), before the Wall went up but at the height of anti-Communist paranoia on the part of the Western powers. Into this maelstrom of distrust, in a city still partially scarred by bulletholes from 1945 and with many buildings missing a wall or two, steps twenty-five year-old Leonard Marnham, the innocent of the title. Leonard is an expert on amps, fuses and recording equipment and has been sent from London for reasons he doesn't know in the beginning to work on a new project in what purports to be an American radar station. It soon turns out that the Americans and British have been working together in secret (of course) digging a tunnel beneath the border that separate the Western and Russian sectors so that they can tap the phone lines and listen in to the messages going to and from Soviet High Command.

It being the 50s, Leonard is innocent in both his professional life and his private life. He was living with his parents back home in England and finds the freedom (for him) of Berlin intoxicating. In the beginning McEwan does well to describe Leonard's personality and contrasts him superbly with the more confident Americans, mostly in the superb characterisation of the brash Bob Glass. There is also a lot of technical information about the operation in the tunnel - sometimes McEwan really overdoes it but I think he was trying to make the scene as realistic as possible. He did the same in the rather silly Saturday when describing a scene of brain surgery. This dedication to the scene underground reminded me of the French writer Zola, who was dedicated to explaining everything in the name of naturalism. The Zola comparison is an apt one, as I will soon explain.

Leonard soon sheds his sexual innocence when he meets the vivacious Berliner Maria, and again McEwan is not shy about describing what goes on between them in Maria's apartment. After a short while, Leonard gets a bit too carried away and almost assaults Maria. It was at this point that I began to lose all sympathy for the character, as he really did act like an idiot. I think it's an important point that a reader does not have to sympathise with characters to appreciate a book, but when Leonard is the designated 'hero' and it is through his eyes that we see every event in the book, for me McEwan failed to keep me on his side. Leonard and Maria soon patch things up, but unfortunately Maria has an ex-husband...

A bare description of the plot doesn't really do the book thus far much justice. It is very well-written, with some great turns of phrase and a good narrative rhythm. The second half of the book is really not for the squeamish - McEwan's obsession with graphic description comes into its own when something terrible and unforeseen occurs in Maria's apartment and things turn very gory. It was difficult to read the next couple of chapters but equally difficult to put the book down! Black humour takes over when Leonard is forced to carry two very heavy suitcases around Berlin, desperately trying to dispose of their contents, but everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. This part of the book again reminded me of Zola: whereas earlier it was Germinal, set in a mining community, that came to mind, in the latter half it was the very nasty Therese Raquin, in which a bored wife and her lover murder her husband. Zola was determined to describe everything so that the reader is confronted with the fact that humans, alive and dead, are basically animals. The overall tone is one of disgust with people, their bodies and their actions. McEwan does more or less the same thing in his own book, but provides a hair-raising twist towards the end that had me on the edge of my seat.

The postscript was not entirely successful for me: I thought it would turn everything on its head and make me see the whole story in a new light. It didn't do that but it still worked as an ending thematically, and at least left this reader with a small feeling of hope for the characters.

Overall then, this was one of the best of McEwan's books that I've read. It's definitely not for those of a nervous disposition! It provided a fascinating insight into 1950s Berlin, had interesting characters and a genuinely involving plot.

After finishing The Innocent, I was hankering to read a classic. I have to read one every few books or I get withdrawal symptoms! I realised that I'd intended to read W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage last year and hadn't found the time, so as it was sitting on the shelf and looked fat and interesting, I decided to go for it. It's 700 pages long in the Vintage edition I own but its style is very easy to read and I'm already over halfway through. I've never read Maugham before and am really enjoying it. Will post about it soon.