The Innocent
Keith, W.D.
THE START OF SOMETHING BIG THE INNOCENT Ian McEwan Doubleday, $18.95,288 pp. W.D. Keith In his startling new novel, The Innocent, Ian McEwan teases his readers with the familiar landscape of the...
...She has been persecuted by an ex-husband, a drunken lout named Otto who reappears unpredictably several times a year to extract money from her and smack her around...
...Keith In his startling new novel, The Innocent, Ian McEwan teases his readers with the familiar landscape of the cold-war espionage thriller...
...When he removed them his face appeared insufficient...
...As the tunnel creeps toward its goal he finds a curious comfort in the damp maze of corridors filled with humming machinery and whispering men...
...New buildings rise next to empty lots and new pavement is lined with young trees...
...A final postscript chapter places us in contemporary Berlin where walls are coming down and old enmities buried...
...There he meets of Maria Eckdorf, a thirty-year-old German office worker...
...At the engagement party Glass toasts "a newer and freer Europe" and commends a "marriage across borders...
...Glass drives him to a warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin, just a hundred yards from the Russian sector...
...She was free, they were both free, to invent their own terms...
...Over the phone Glass raps out an address and a meeting time for the following morning and the line goes dead...
...The things he really wanted to see were up close...
...One cafe is so densely filled with those buying and selling secrets that it resembles the Chicago futures market...
...Evidence of the next war is everywhere, however...
...Along the side of his nose were red pressure streaks, dents in the very bone structure...
...Marnham's role in this effort is comically mundane: he is to open boxes of tape recorders, stack them on shelves, and then burn the cartons...
...This interval of relative equality is shattered by the return of Otto...
...This clinical examination of a solitary face fixes the reader's attention emphatically...
...For Maria the affair represents a different kind of beginning...
...Before this can begin, however, he shares a night on the town with Glass which ends in a crowded beer hall...
...We will be that close to all of Marnham's discoveries of flesh and spirit, and to the one act of unspeakable horror that he cannot avoid and from which we cannot wrench our attention...
...Now they cling together, one admittedly stronger than the other, but both filled with fear...
...A girl's face...
...Every detail of this macabre nightmare is viewed with unblinking clarity, and when ultimately Marnham's two secret worlds collide, the damage is irreparable...
...His glasses, stained yellowish by evaporated body fat this, at least, was his theory perched absurdly above his nose...
...Matched with novelist McEwan's harrowing technical achievement is a carefully crafted vision of intimacy as a metaphor for politics...
...A circuit diagram, a valve filament, another face...
...Maria is drawing him closer as well, but as his amatory confidence grows, so too do violent fantasies of domination...
...Marnham's opinion of Americans comes only from the cinema and so his meeting with Glass produces his usual posture of defensive politeness and reflexive disapproval...
...Alone that night in bed, however, Maria confesses something that begins a sequence of sustained violence, nearly comic mishap, and horror, that is at once fantastic and utterly plausible...
...And she really had discovered for herself this shy Englishman with the steady gaze and the long lashes, she had him first, she would have him all to herself...
...When finally admitted to the warehouse he is led underground to a secret tunnel a tunnel that will ultimately end at the landline communications cable linking all the Eastern European capitals to Moscow...
...The British and American allies are as mistrustful of each other as they are of the new Soviet enemy...
...From that night their affair unfolds blissfully in Maria's freezing cold-water flat, with piles of blankets, cheap wine, and sudden, wholly unexpected pleasures...
...With this woman Marnham forces his defenses down and wills a new life into existence...
...With this backdrop McEwan's book attains a powerful elegaic force and resonance...
...In these early days of the cold war new ground rules of secrecy, fear, and suspicion are being laid down and new players constantly recruited...
...Gray, frigid views of postwar Germany, plenty of cigarette smoke, and a parade of disillusioned faces are properly assembled...
...Marnham spends the rest of the winter commuting between his two secret lives...
...Maria's sexual initiation of Leonard reverses the customary structure of power...
...New realities of power, defense, and protection alter the bond between Leonard and Maria once again...
...Having confronted each other's weaknesses, the couple soberly begins to think of marriage...
...Spies fill the city...
...It is the winter of 1955 in Berlin, and the rubble of the last war has been largely cleared away...
...The newest and certainly most "innocent" of these is Leonard Marnham, a near-sighted English post office technician with a university degree in electronics and little knowledge of the world beyond his parents' quiet home...
...Though it survives his attempt to act these out, his relationship with Maria thereafter takes on a more settled, less ecstatic air...
...In this arrangement they decide to announce their engagement...
...He is entrusted with more essential tasks and is eventually enlisted by the British to spy against their American allies...
...Her fear of being physically abused had receded...
...He should do without his glasses...
...He has at once confounded our expectations and created a wholly original rendering of a cold war not only between nations but at every level of human interaction, even the most intimate.n the most intimate...
...Feeling foolish and even more ignorant, Marnham wanders in the solitude of his new apartment, the first rooms he has ever had to himself: "He caught sight of himself in a wall mirror and approached helplessly...
...McEwan fashions his own landscape...
...Summoned to Berlin to participate in a British-American collaboration involving "telephones and communications devices," he is shunted by a peevish British lieutenant to an American contact, Bob Glass...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 12
