My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“The Innocent” is the joyful, light, amusing, a bit suspenseful and quite insightful, if a little unrealistic and farcical, story of a British telephone worker who gets called to the post-world war 2, but pre-wall Berlin to work in a secret tunnel, meant to spy on the Russians.
The perspective of the up-tight Brit seeing the boisterous Americans, the criminal and/or victimized Germans and the bombed-out city on the verge of the cold war is definitely fascinating.
The unstoppable journey of the innocent to become the guilty (or at least guiltily acting), is almost Kafkaesque – just with a smirk and a chuckle.
However the book didn’t blow me away like some of McEwan’s other books, which seemed to be more profound, albeit not as amusing.