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The Innocent

A startlingly prescient novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons

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The Innocent

By: Ian McEwan
Narrated by: Steven Pacey
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The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life - and to lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening - a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. Coming of Age Espionage Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction Surveillance
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Critic Reviews

To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy's adventure yarn...it ensure McEwan's major status
The sheer cleverness of the book is dazzling, and only fully to be appreciated as you turn the last page: but then cleverness is a real virtue here, the best guide possible to the questionable territory between innocence and whatever comes after
It's the most tightly plotted of Ian McEwan's novels, and to argue properly for its excellence would involve showing how the political and emotional themes are inseparable from its narrative ingenuity, the patterns of revelation and about-turn which mark its final pages (Jonathan Coe)
Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact...Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of the East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest
Deft, taut fiction... Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best
All stars
Most relevant
Another ripping yarn from Ian McEwan. Lots of twists and turns. Characters well drawn - and loved the way it ended.

The Innocent

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An intuitively aware novel of innocence and the natural law. Sexual guilt manifested in a horrific physical way. Edge of your seat and a beautiful love affair. I hope they make it back to Berlin together.

Sexual guilt held in two suitcases

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Maybe not one of his best novels, but it certainly started ok, but then went into this macabre setting that left me, recoiling and disturbed.
I also found the narration cold and emotionless.

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With a deep affection for Berlin-based espionage novels - and having devoured much of Ian McEwan’s back catalogue - I assumed (incorrectly, and with misplaced confidence) that I was in for a thrill. Especially after The Times assured me the plot “crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense,” and after spotting it on Tim Shipman’s Top 125 Spybrary list, which I follow more closely than an agent tailing a suspect. The promise of 1950s Germany, Allies digging clandestine tunnels beneath the city, had me mentally deployed to HQ East Berlin faster than the start of an Oktoberfest Pilsner challenge.

So I eagerly began. And then waited. And waited some more. I’m still not sure what was duller: the tunnel, the ‘spy’, or the plot valiantly attempting to impersonate one. The only thing that truly crackled was my patience, as I found myself wishing - at an impressive pace - that the book would simply end. One chapter into the gratuitous “trauma cleaning” and I was ready to dial the VoPo: please, please, put me out of my misery.

The novel’s lone saving grace is McEwan’s effortlessly readable prose, with special mention reserved for Maria’s final letter - genuinely beautiful, and a sharp reminder of what this book could have been. Sadly, by then, the lit tunnels were all black.

Sorry. Not a thriller Mr McEwan.

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