BOOKS

Getting away with murder

James Buchan

THE INNOCENT by Ian McEwan

Cape, £13.90, pp. 232

Nine pages into The Innocent, Ian McEwan's newest novel, the reader will get a jolt. Up to then, it's been smooth going: a routine Cold War setting, English and American intelligence officers with well-defined national characteristics, Ber- lin street names, stuff in German, evidence of mugged-up history:

'That's Fritz. They all get called Fritz. One of Gehlen's men. You know who I mean?'

This particular reader was in clover. I thought: is Ian McEwan, of all people, throwing it in to write a spy thriller? Do I get paid all this money just for reading a sort of high-brow Funeral in Berlin? Then, at the top of page nine, comes the jolt. The intelligence officers are having coffee:

From across the landing, through the open door, came the urinous scent of burnt toast smelled at a distance.

The word urinous is pure McEwan, his weird preoccupations breaking into the flat narrative and knocking the reader side- ways. Everything comes back in a rush: The Comfort of Strangers, the short stories, the lay, the smelly sex, the blood all over the place. That urinous: it is as if the fairground operator had slipped the ratchet on the roller-coaster. You regret getting on. You want to get off. You don't mind about the money. You wave wildly at the glum young man. But the safety bar is down, and you are already moving, picking up speed, and there is nothing to do but hang on through scenes of unexampled horror and foulness till the fellow hands you out, legs shaking, sick with fatigue, at the end of the book.

With The Innocent, Ian McEwan has abandoned the speculative interests of The Child in Time (published in 1987) and gone back to his first love, which is carving up his characters. Once again, he chooses a well-frequented literary setting for those acts of fictional outrage. In The Comfort of Strangers, published in 1981, it was tourist Venice, with its safe bustle of characters from Thomas Mann or Daphne du Maurier. This time, we get Berlin in 1955-56, a place teeming with literary spies and double agents. For all the ponderous efforts of local and out-of-town critics, McEwan gets away with horrible murder both times.

In The Innocent, Leonard Marnham is a young and awkward Post Office engineer newly arrived in Berlin to work on a clandestine project known as Operation Gold. This was a tunnel dug by the CIA and MI6 into the Soviet sector of Berlin in the hope of tapping underground cables

carrying secret communications. (The tun- nel was evidently betrayed by George Blake, who makes a true cameo appear- ance in this book: sharply cut, coruscat- ing.) In a bar and dance hall called the Resi, while drinking with his new associates and carrying a rose behind his ear, Marnham receives a note from another table by pneumatic tube. It is from a girl called Maria Eckdorf, who has survived the liberation of Berlin and a brutal husband, lives in Kreuzberg, and is lonely. They fall in love. The story does not depend for its effect on my not giving away the plot, no sir, but I don't suppose I should anyway. Somebody gets killed, carved up and car- ried around in a box. The tunnel is betrayed. Thirty-one years later, Marnham returns to Berlin and thinks troubled thoughts about the end of the Cold War.

This simple story shows McEwan's tremendous strengths as a writer. He is good at portraying complex relationships, between an official driver and his passen- ger, say, or between lovers. McEwan can still describe a man's first love affair with the teenager's queasy and tumultuous pride:

If Leonard needed proof of his dedication to a passion it was in the matted thickness of his grey socks, and the aroma of butter, vaginal juices and potatoes that rose from his chest when he loosened the top button of his shirt. The excessively heated interiors at the ware- house released from the folds of his clothes the scent of over-used bed-sheets and prompted disabling reveries in the window- less room.

This sort of thing caused a sensation when McEwan's first book of stories, First Love, Last Rites, come out in 1975. Mc- Ewan has refined it a bit, cutting out the eels and the rats, but it remains as direct as ever.

McEwan is also good at creating small private spaces for his characters: Marn- ham's government-issue apartment, his cramped room at the tunnel warehouse, the piled-high bed in Maria's freezing flat. What is strange about this novel is that the larger settings are all wrong. Neither Ber- lin nor the 1950s come across at all. This is an untypical weakness. His Venice in The Comfort of Strangers is maddening and claustrophobic and he creates an England of authoritarian Thatcherism and farm monoculture for The Child in Time. It is as if McEwan had taken the Berlin setting off the peg.

Again, in The Comfort of Strangers, the reader is led in with great care, under- mined, demoralised until he starts at the smallest thing: I remember a harmless swim off the Lido which had me turning pages in handfuls. Here there are long passages where nothing much happens at all. (I liked these, for reasons which will become clear.)

In describing the tunnel, which a journeyman thriller-writer could do in his sleep, McEwan writes as if he is translating from Arabic:

The forklift truck was parked near the rim of a well-lit hole. It was twenty feet or so deep and as much in diameter. An iron rung ladder was bolted to one of the pilings which had been driven into the floor of the shaft. At the base, cut into the wall of the shaft, was a round black hole, the entrance to a tunnel. Various lines and wires fed into it from above. There was a ventilation pipe which was connected to a noisy pump set well back against the basement wall. There were field telephone wires, a thick cluster of electrical cable, and a hose streaked with cement which fed into another smaller machine which stood silent beside the first. The last-minute smear of McEwanite ce- ment can't disguise a curiously vague and uninteresting piece of description.

I suspect the problem is that McEwan doesn't give a toss about the tunnel, Berlin or the Cold War. The themes of loyalty and betrayal so efficiently worked by John Le Carre and others do not figure in The Innocent. What this book is about is packing and unpacking things with a hang- over, first 150 Ampex tape-recorders, then a male body.

The tape-recorders are horrible enough. There is no writer alive who can instill so much nastiness into inanimate objects:

He drew the hunting knife from its sheath and plunged it in. The cardboard yielded easily, like flesh, and he felt and heard something brittle shatter at the knife's tip. He experienced a thrill of panic. He cut away the lid, pulled clear handfuls of wood shav- ings, and compressed sheets of corrugated paper. When the cheesecloth wrapping round the tape-recorder had been cut away he could see a long diagonal scratch across the area that would be covered by the spools. One of the control knobs had split in two.

But nothing in McEwan's writing, or any literary fiction I know, prepares the reader for what is to come.

The murder and the carve-up and dis- posal of the body occupies pages 135-215 of this novel. Though I read the book twice, I could not bring myself to read this Passage a second time, even to copy it out in quotation. That it is an extraordinary piece of writing goes without saying. I still don't know what to make of it.

There is quite a lot of journalism in this book — McEwan thanks people for re- search and comments and stuff, always a bad sign in a novel — and the description of the body is as precise as you would expect. But I cannot believe these 80 pages are there for the sake of information, to tell us how to cut up and dispose of a body. McEwan himself is quite snooty about journalistic novels (in A Child in Time):

. . . international best-sellers, the kind of book whose real purpose was to explain the Workings of a submarine, an orchestra or a hotel.

Nor is the carve-up designed as a stress to test his characters. They scarcely meet after the deed is done. Fictional time moves on and the novel's loose ends have to be tied up with a long Dear John letter in the last chapter.

I think the dismemberment and disposal of the body is simply a literary task McEwan set himself, and for which the rest of the book is merely a frame (or box). He succeeds brilliantly in his task. These pages carry a feeling of oppression, sadness and guilt that I know only from one or two nightmares. For this intensity, people will no doubt pay good money, but it is all a bit dispiriting. With The Innocent, our best young, or youngish, novelist has created a new publishing category: literary slasher fiction.