The Innocent

McEwan, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385494335 ISBN 13: 9780385494335

Publisher: Anchor Books, 1999

A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this masterful work from the author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham's intelligence work--tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow--offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening--a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

Review:

"Never less than wholly entertaining." --The Wall Street Journal

"Deft, taut fiction. . . . Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best." --Time

"So exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting. . . . McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve." --Newsweek

"Has the spooky, crooked-angled, danger-around-every-corner feeling of a Carol Reid film. It reminded me often of The Third Man and that is no mean feat." --Jonathan Carroll, The Washington Post Book World

"Powerful and disturbing . . . a tour de force." --The New York Times

From the Publisher:

'Crackles like thin ice with suspense' Mail on Sunday
'To call The Innocent a spy novel would be like calling Lord of the Flies a boy's adventure yarn...the plot crackles like thin ice with dread and suspense...it ensures McEwan's major staus' John Carey, Sunday Times

'Generous in scale, simple in its hideous impact...Ironically, he has celebrated the obsequies of East-West spy thriller by writing one of the subtlest' David Hughes, Mail on Sunday

'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' Michael Wood, London Review of Books