The Innocent By Ian McEwan

Set during the Cold War, "The Innocent" revolves around Leonard Markham. In his mid twenties, Leonard is the stereotypical Englishman. Mild mannered, shy, bespectacled, polite and stuffy, he lives at home in suburban Tottenham with his middle class parents and works as an electronics engineer for the Post Office. He's graduated from university but still knows little of the world beyond the safe environment of his parents living room and the BBC World Service.

Leonard takes a job in Berlin to work on Operation Gold, an Anglo-American intelligence project to tap Soviet phone lines by tunnelling into the Russian sector. He finds himself in a world of secrecy and subterfuge during his working hours and in his leisure time he finds independence and freedom. he strikes up an uneasy sort of "friendship" with Bob Glass, an American in charge of Leonard's role in Operation Gold. While out on the town with Glass, Leonard meets an older German divorcee, Maria Eckdorf, a woman who has lived through a war and has learned from bitter experience that time is too precious to waste on social conventialities.

Maria is nothing like the prim and proper girls "saving themselves for marriage" that Leonard has met before. Impulsive and captivating, Maria sweeps Leonard off his feet and into her bed and Our Man In Berlin is smitten big time.

Leonard is supremely happy. He's enjoying his work, he's besotted by Maria and he's finding the mix of new cultures he's experiencing fascinating after years of repressed monotony. He and Maria move in together, share a passion for American music and learn to jive. Life really couldn't be better and eventually Leonard and Maria become engaged.

The only cloud on the horizon is Maria's ex-husband Otto, a violent drunk who turns up occasionally to demand money from Maria and to slap her around. When he discovers Maria is involved in a serious relationship with Leonard, he beats her up worse than ever before...

The ultimate fate of Leonard and Maria's love story is sealed on the night of their engagement when Otto shows up and tragedy follows in his wake...

From happiness stems horror and from innocence stems a waking nightmare as Leonard struggles to cope with the aftermath of that night...the decisions he makes have ramifications that echo through the subsequent decades both for him and Maria and for international relations...by the end, Leonard is anything but "The Innocent" he once was...

"The Innocent" works on several levels. On the most basic it's a love story with a twist. Look a bit closer and you'll find a complex analogy of post WW2 international relations..."The Innocent" is cleverly written, intriguing and very enjoyable.

The incorporation of "real-life" events as a background for the story (Operation Gold and the double-agent George Blake) and McEwan's masterful descriptive writing make it easy for the reader to paint a mental picture of the time and the place.

"The Innocent" by Ian McEwan on Amazon - available in hardback, paperback, audio and Kindle format