The Innocent

Ian McEwan

4 ideas

1. Engineer, murdered ex-husband, suitcases, Berlin tunnel

   In 1955 Leonard Marnham, a naive 25-year-old British Post Office telephone engineer, is posted to Operation Gold, the joint CIA–MI6 tunnel dug under the Berlin sector boundary to tap Soviet phone lines. He falls for Maria Eckdorf, an older German divorcée, and when her violent ex-husband Otto ambushes them in her flat, the struggle ends with Otto's skull crushed. The couple spend a night dismembering the body into two suitcases, which Leonard hauls across the divided city and finally into the tunnel's secret facility, just as the operation, already betrayed by a Soviet mole, is exposed.

2. Borrowed conquest fantasies script intimate violence

   Leonard's sexual life turns dangerous when he imports the language of military victory into it: he casts himself as the conquering soldier and Maria as the occupied German, and a private fantasy of dominance tips into an attempted assault. The novel argues that collective narratives of war and victory do not stay on the battlefield. They supply ready-made scripts for personal desire, and ordinary men can act them out before they recognise what they are doing.

3. Secrecy that protects nothing yet corrodes

   The tunnel runs on strict compartmentalisation and need-to-know clearance levels, yet George Blake had betrayed it to the Soviets before it was dug, so all the security guarded a secret the enemy already had. Meanwhile the habit of concealment spreads into Leonard's private life, and he hides first his work and then a corpse from everyone around him. Secrecy regimes can fail completely against their real target while still training their participants in lying, isolation and suspicion.

4. Personal lost innocence mirrors imperial handover

   Leonard's coming of age runs alongside Britain's slide into junior partnership with a confident, gadget-rich America, embodied by his brash boss Bob Glass, who ends up marrying Maria. Read this way, the private plot is a history of the handover of power.

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