I read this july 2009 on flight home from Rio de Janiero. I loved his struggle with his bi-racial identity, something missing from The Color of Water . I admired his way with words, often lyrical passages. His desire/imperative to "be a community organiser" spoke volumes not in the text. This tied in nicely with a TV doco " Made in Chicago, the making of Barak Obama". ( )

Ian McEwan may now be the hottest thing going, but his earlier books are hit or miss. The Company of Strangers? Creepy. The Cement Garden? Disturbing. The dexterous elegance of books like Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach were still a long ways off.

His 1990 novel, The Innocent, is a flawed but absorbing transition between McEwan’s earlier works and the later novels. The book is set in post-war, pre-wall Berlin, where 25-year-old Leonard Marnham is a British post office technician assigned to a secret spy mission (based on an actual Anglo-American joint spy effort). He falls in love with Maria Eckdorf, a German divorcee, five years older than him. When things go wrong, they go horribly, sickeningly wrong. Yet McEwan deftly shows how each step down the slippery slope was justifiable and even necessary for the two lovers.

Despite the violence, this is a love story. McEwen uses violent tragedy to speed up the natural termination of the romantic, passionate phase of the couple’s relationship. Unfortunately, his gruesomely accurate descriptions distract the reader from McEwan’s astute examination of the male/female dynamic. Still, although moved along by espionage and homicide, it is the bigger themes of romantic love and the nature of intimacy – not the events of the plot – that are the core of the book.

Also posted on Rose City Reader. ( )

McEwan is a good writer and "The Innocent" is a solid book. It has a couple of the themes that McEwan has returned to successfully in his other works: how men and women might misinterpret each other's behavior at critical moments and thus forever change their lives, and the sense of "what might have been".

The characters and their relationships are what held my interest; the backdrop of espionage during the Cold War in Berlin and the technical details did not. I knocked my rating down a half star because of chapter 18. I won't spoil it by providing details; perhaps it was needed to explain the characters actions in subsequent chapters, but it was a bit much for me.

Hard to pick a favorite quote but....
"He was fumbling with the unfamiliar lock and Maria was right at his back. Though it still surprised her, she was to some extent familiar with the delicacy of masculine pride. Despite a surface assurance, men were easily offended. Their moods could swing wildly. Caught in the turbulence of unacknowledged emotions, they tended to mask their uncertainty with aggression. She was thirty; her experience was not vast, and she was thinking mostly of her husband and one or two violent soldiers she had known. The man scrabbling to leave by her front door was less like the men she had known and more like herself. She knew just how it felt. When you felt sorry for yourself, you wanted to make things worse." ( )

8 years before McEwan's Booker-winning Amsterdam was The Innocent, set in another continental European capital. Already there are signs that McEwan by then has entered the brilliant stage of his career. This book has very good plot construction, and once again, becase I hardly knew anything about the story, I was in for a surprise. Parts that seem unconnected at the beginning at the end come together nicely and appropriately. And so as I was reading deeper and deeper I found myself enjoying it increasingly.

This book for me is in many ways similar to Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach (At least that's my impression based on my memories of these two works.) An affair/relationship in memory which, because of fortune or misfortune, happening at a wrong time, ended a little differently than originally desired. My thoughts were that McEwan got better as he passed the decade with his prose. So I found the writing (skills) in his latter works even more sharpened and honed. But this is not to say that The Innocent didn't appeal to me. I think it's just that the poetry in this one is less pronounced.

There's a bit of an Anti-American thing going on at the beginning, but then I think the author has every intention to conclude that that starting impression has no basis. The American character that was unfavourably portrayed turned out to be a fantastic man. And with just this little fact it can be revealed that this book is every bit a spy novel with an incredible twist among all its turns.

And that's why I love McEwan's work. It has everything for anyone who enjoys the work of a real writer. A writer's writer. ( )

This story is a journey back in time to a period that most of our parents lived through and are still living with as the impresions of such a vivid experience as a world war do not just simply fade away but become part of your life and continue to influence your life as time goes by, the characters in this story were as real to me as anyone I've ever met. ( )