Slacks for Ella Funt

As much as I love McEwan’s more recent books, particularly Atonement, I haven’t read all of his earlier stuff. He’s always been fond of the twist ending, but it feels more integrated into the book as a whole in the more recent books. The Innocent starts out like a relatively normal Cold War spy thriller. Leonard Marnham is a normal, average Englishman who lives with his parents and works for the phone company. He gets transferred to a contract with the CIA in Berlin on a top secret project. He socializes with the Americans, works on his specific tasks to the project, and starts seeing a German woman named Maria. He’s pretty pleased with his new life when (of course) something goes horribly wrong. At some point, I had half forgotten that this was McEwan, and was expecting the plot twist to be an espionage-style betrayal. But being an early McEwan book, it was much more gruesome than that. He’s a brilliant writer, but I think he’s learned since then that plot twists can be shocking without having to be grotesque.