The Innocent by Ian McEwan

The Innocent by Ian McEwan is a spy novel. It's a love story. It's not a whodunnit, but it is a who did what. It's also a tour of 1950s Berlin. Getting tied up in labeling genres becomes a pointless exercise, when it is far easier to state that this book is a novel. And this label denotes something much broader, deeper and certainly less predictable that any genre placement. When an author writes a novel, the imagination involved can take the book, its characters, the writer and then the reader along any path, towards any subject. Like the writer, a character need not feel duty bound to spend every waking hour in pursuit of a linear plot to ensure it reaches some endpoint. Life, like experience, itself, is not like that. No matter how focused we may become on any activity, consciousness always presents us with a jumble of stimuli and experiences. We may select  what we choose to see, to hear or to acknowledge, but the rest is always there, intruding. And for The Innocent of Ian McEwan's novel life takes numerous unforeseen turns, despite having started in a form that for most people would itself be a very special starting point.

The principal character is a telephone engineer-cum-electronics whizz-kid. But we are in the 1950s, when such things still relied on old fashioned telephones, cables and, crucially, tape recorders. This last ingredient gives away the fact that the novel is set in the permanent spying of the Cold War and this is also spiced by the setting near the division in Berlin between East and West, between a British-American capitalist enterprise and Soviet communist experiment. The plan is to tunnel as far as a run of cables on the other side, listen in and then analyse the recorded communications. Our lad from Dollis Hill in London has not only been trained for such work, but has a reputation for being something of a genius of the genre.

But like most lads, he likes a drink and, though he is far from experienced with women, he is also capable of falling for a woman. He, of course, does just that. She is German, older than him and more experienced. An essential art of Ian McEwan's book is the way these lovers discover how to be with one another from their individually different starting points.

Unfortunately, she is married, and the husband, who is still current and not former, is a tough guy who drinks a lot and doesn't look after himself. He unfortunately can look after himself and is well known for doing just that.

It has to be recalled that Ian McEwan's nickname at the start of his career was Ian Macabre, and The Innocent does not disappoint. The triangle works itself out and becomes at least a quadrilateral when an apex is deleted only to be replaced by others.

The Book Of Evidence by John Banville

Freddie Montgomery, the central character of John Banville’s The Book Of Evidence, is an apparently complex man. The word ‘apparently’ is important because he has a tendency to cloak really quite simple actions in complex, sometimes convoluted narrative.

The Book Of Evidence has a strong plot, but one that is revealed only piecemeal in the form of what seem at first sight to be the random recollections of an imprisoned man. A potential reader would not want a listing of these details here, since the manner of their revelation is one of the most absorbing aspects of this beautifully crafted book.

As Freddie reveals his story, just a little at a time, we learn his motives and discover precisely what he has done to warrant his incarceration and trial. This jigsaw of history eventually fits together to reveal a series of events and relationships that were perhaps always confused. That’s life. Suffice it to say that there is a family history, an art collection, the theft of a painting and a murder, nothing less than the smashing of a woman’s head with a hammer. Piece that together with a gay bar, snippets of Ireland, police and prison and there is the basic framework of John Banville’s novel. 

t is the author’s use of language, however, that creates most of this book’s effect. Though never aspiring to difficulty for its own sake, the style is often complex, often employs convoluted sentences that meander their way to places their openings seem unable even to conceive. Their colour and effect make The Book Of Evidence a delight to read from beginning to end. But some time before the end, their effect may also be likened to the surface of a busy canvas whose almost fanatical attention to detail eventually drags attention away from the overall design. For some, the style might begin to grate.

Thus, by the end of the book, I felt that the stylistic invention had begun to dominate, to confuse, even obfuscate. There were powerful points to make about the character of Freddie, but the parts that adhered – sometimes randomly – to his outline rather confused the impression he made. There again, that might just have been the point, since he also eventually managed to convey a peculiarly individual, a strangely distant and detached relationship with his own actions and motives. In the end, we know just as much about Freddie as he wanted us to know.

View this book on amazon The Book of Evidence