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.

Stalin by Edvard Radzinski

Edvard Radzinski’s Stalin is literally and figuratively an enormous work. But perhaps a quarter of a million words is still insufficient to do justice to a subject as monstrously bloodthirsty as Jozef Stalin. Even a list of names of those he ordered killed might not be longer than this tome.

Published in 1996, the book claims to be the first in-depth study of Stalin since the release of documents that happened at the demise of the Soviet Union. Exactly what role this material played is still unclear, but what it did not do was change the author’s opinion of his subject. In hindsight, it is perhaps not possible to hold a different view. Today, even the most diehard supporter of Bolshevism would acknowledge the utter perversity of Stalin’s crimes, but what always seems to be lacking in studies such as Edvard Radzinski’s is a fair description of the context in which the excesses unfolded.

What is clear about Stalin is that he was a survivor, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that many who became associated with him were not. From the very start, however, as a local activist in Georgia, he was a ruthless operator. In the name of collective action, he displayed a single-minded devotion to self-promotion. Like a stereotypical gangland streetfighter, he survived by standing on the bodies of those he could knock down. Thus, in a state that claimed its authority came from “the people”, Stalin became, effectively, the archetypal absolute monarch. Like in medieval kingdoms, where so many people at court seemed to end their lives on a chopping block having offended the all-powerful ruler, there was apparently no shortage of those who were willing to be admitted to the dangerous inner circle. Perhaps the rewards were worth the risk. Perhaps refusal, especially in the case of Stalin, guaranteed an even faster promotion to the butcher’s axe.

Overall, the book is rather predictable and even reads like polemic in places. Perhaps worth reading… I finished it two years ago and thought it not worth reviewing…