The Innocent By Ian McEwan
"The Innocent" is Ian McEwan's fourth novel, first published in 1989.
"The Innocent" is centered around Leonard Markham, a young, idealistic English electronics engineer sent to Germany during the Cold War to work on an Anglo-American intelligence project.
Finding 1950's Berlin a culture shock in comparison to the bleakness of post WWII Britain, Leonard finds fun and friendship amongst the American military personnel and experiences first love with an older German woman. His happiness however, is doomed not to last...
"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.
A film version of "The Innocent" was released in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins, Isabela Rosselini, Campbell Scott.
"The Innocent" By Ian McEwan - Table of Contents
Ian McEwan - The Innocent
- Plot Summary Of "The Innocent" By Ian McEwan
- Reviews Of "The Innocent" By Ian McEwan
- The Innocent On Twitter
- "The Innocent" On Amazon UK
- "The Innocent" On Amazon USA
- "The Innocent" By Ian McEwan - Summary
- "The Innocent" Film On Amazon UK
- "The Innocent" Film On Amazon USA
- More About The Author Of "The Innocent", Ian McEwan
- Other Novels By Ian McEwan
- The Innocent Feedback
Plot Summary Of "The Innocent" By Ian McEwan
Plot synopsis and review of "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" is a good read - it's not edge of your seat stuff by any means, but it's competently written and exciting enough to be a satisfying experience. 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.
Reviews Of "The Innocent" By Ian McEwan
- Ian McEwan: THE INNOCENT
- THE INNOCENT By Ian McEwan.Comments by Bob Corbett
The Innocent On Twitter
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"The Innocent" On Amazon UK
"The Innocent" by Ian McEwan
"This is vintage McEwan. He describes the love affair with feeling and, I guess, from some experience. I liked the sharp contrast between the mechanics and bizarre logic of the Cold War and the unpredictability of human behaviour when it is allowed free reign. 50s Berlin is also beautifully evoked - Harry Lime's Vienna moved north. The novel has a neat and typically weird McEwan twist before its moving, sentimental denouement. Great reading - thoroughly recommended to fans and sceptics alike.">
"The Innocent" On Amazon USA
"The Innocent" by Ian McEwan
The Innocent: A Novel
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Amazon reader review
"...an impeccably constructed psychological thriller set in Berlin during the Cold War. Basing his story on an actual (but little known) incident, he tells of the secret tunnel under the Soviet sector which the British and Americans built in 1954 to gain access to the Russians' communication system. The protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is a 25-year-old, naive, unsophisticated English post office technician who is astonished and alarmed to find himself involved in a top-secret operation. At the same time that he loses his political innocence, Leonard experiences his sexual initiation in a clandestine affair with a German divorcee five years his senior. As his two secret worlds come together, events develop into a gruesome nightmare, far more macabre than anything McEwan ( The Child in Time ) has previously written, building to a searing, unforgettable scene of surrealist intensity in which Leonard and his lover try to conceal evidence of a murder. Acting to save himself from a prison sentence, Leonard desperately performs an act of espionage whose ironic consequences resonate down the years to a twister of an ending. Though its plot rivals any thriller in narrative tension, this novel is also a character study--of a young man coming of age in bizarre circumstances, and of differences in national character: the gentlemanly Brits, all decorum and civility; the brash, impatient Americans; the cynical Germans. McEwan's neat, tensile prose raises this book to the highest level of the genre."
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"The Innocent" By Ian McEwan - Summary
"The Innocent" By Ian McEwan on Wikipedia
The Innocent is a 1990 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. The novel takes place in 1955/6 Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War and centres on the joint CIA/MI6 operation to build a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin into the Russian sector to tap the phone lines of the Soviet High Command.Leonard Marnham is a 25-year-old Englishman who sets up and repairs the tape recorders used in the tunnel. He falls in love with Maria Eckdorf, a 30-year-old divorced German. The story revolves around their relationship and Leonard's role in the operation.
Plot Summary Of The Innocent
Leonard Marnham is "The Innocent" of the Novel, a Post Office engineer who is employed by the Americans to install the signals in the tunnel they are building specifically to tap the Russians. The British and Americans view each other with distrust. Leonard is befriended by Bob Glass, an American obsessed with security.
The British are aware that the Americans are on the verge of a breakthrough with decoding, and are annoyed that they have not been a part of it. Macafee, a scientist, insists that Leonard act as a spy for them, as he is in with the Americans. Leonard fails dismally in his role as spy.
Ironically, Leonard lives above a rather stuffy character named George Blake, who was the Soviet Agent imprisoned in the 1960's, and who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. The Novel neatly intertwines fictional meetings between the two men, and one of Blake's most notorious betrayals is given a new slant by Leonard's foolhardy act.
Themes Used In The Innocent
Leonard becomes fatally embroiled in the life of his German girlfriend, Maria. He finds his life changed forever in the space of one evening. A virgin, he is introduced to the delights of sex by Maria, who is herself entranced by his innocent charm. She is not threatened by him. and this is very important to her. However her past catches up with her one fateful night. The tunnel, loyalties, all become part of Leonard's desperate attempt to escape his deed.The Novel unravels Leonard's "innocence" in a deceptively comic fashion, the 25 year old Englishman, bumbling along,out of his depth, enduring jokes and insults from the Americans, suddenly finds himself at the abyss of fear and terror, where betrayal becomes easy.
McEwan also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie.
Read the article on Wikipedia at The Innocent
"The Innocent" Film On Amazon UK
"The Innocent" - DVD - 1993 - starring Anthony Hopkins, Isabela Rosselini, Campbell Scott
The Innocent
[1993]
(REGION 1)
(NTSC)
"Steamy thiller that combines passion with international intrigue"
A dangerous espionage mission turns deadly when an aggressive CIA agent (Hopkins) learns that his young partner (Scott) has become involved with a mysterious seductress (Rossellini). The suspense escalates as the agent races to save his doomed partner ... with a plan that will force the young man and his beautiful lover to choose between untold secrets ... and dark passions! "
"The Innocent" Film On Amazon USA
"The Innocent" - DVD - 1993 - starring Anthony Hopkins, Isabela Rosselini, Campbell Scott
The Innocent
Amazon Price: $9.99 (as of 12/19/2009)
List Price: $9.99
Used Price: $3.89
"From legendary director John Schlesinger (MIDNIGHT COWBOY, MARATHON MAN, THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN). Oscar(R)-winner Anthony Hopkins (THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Best Actor, 1991) stars with Isabella Rossellini (ROGER DODGER, EMPIRE) in this steamy thiller that combines passion with international intrigue! A dangerous espionage mission turns deadly when an aggressive CIA agent (Hopkins) learns that his young partner (Campbell Scott, ROGER DODGER) has become involved with a mysterious seductress (Rossellini). The suspense escalates as the agent races to save his doomed partner ... with a plan that will force the young man and his beautiful lover to choose between untold secrets ... and dark passions! "
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More About The Author Of "The Innocent", Ian McEwan
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Ian McEwan - British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, And Screenwriter
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Ian McEwan has been writing fiction since the 1970's and has written many bestsellers and received numerous literary awards and glowing critical acclaim. It is difficult to sum up Ian McEwan's writing...a few words and phrases spring to mind...
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Short Stories By Ian McEwan
More books by Ian McEwan...
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First Love, Last Rites By Ian McEwan
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First Love, Last Rites is Ian McEwan's first collection of short stories and was originally published in 1975. This collection was Ian McEwan's first published work and comprises a collection of eight short stories, all of which are summarised indiv...
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In Between The Sheets By Ian McEwan
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"In Between The Sheets" is a collection of short stories by award-winning author Ian McEwan, first published in 1978 Like McEwan's earlier short story collection, "First Love, Last Rites", the individual stories in "In...
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