Blast from the past: McEwan, Ian. The Innocent. Knopf Canada, 2014.
McEwan, Ian. The Innocent. Knopf Canada, 2014.
This was one of the books recommended to me by ChatGPT as parallels to the conceit of Once we were heroes (quondam Glamour Boys): i.e. the idea of a story set in a much later present in which the characters struggle in light of some previous experience in the war.
The key thing for me is a) that the time needs to be primarily in the later present, and b) the present needs to be quite distant from the precipitating event. There are lots of split-time, war-and-immediate-after-math novels, and there are a few split-time war-and-much-later novels (e.g. Cryptonomicon). And I suppose you could call something like The Sun Also Rises a novel that has a later present from a war (though not a single event shared within that war shared by all the characters).
In the end, The Innocent turned out to be almost exactly the opposite of Once we were Heroes: it is a novel about the precipitating event — broadly speaking a historical early-cold-war event in which the allies dug under the Russian sector of Berlin to tap Soviet phone-lines, though the actual trouble is caused by a fictional murder and its aftermath — that ends with a coda set in a much later present (1988, I think it is, just before the fall of the wall), when the main character returns to the site of the base out of which he worked.
A strong parallel is the concluding letter from the main female protagonist, in which she writes in the present to the main male protagonist about what happened in her war and how that affected her and his relationship, tying together a number of plot lines (I was really glad to see that, in my view, anyway, this worked well). Additional structural similarities include use of a sex scene and (spoiler alert) a matching dismemberment scene as markers for plot turning points about one-third and two-thirds of the way through, and, I’d argue, a very slow plot development: there’s very little forward plot motion in this novel. The story is basically: English Naif works with the Americans, meets girl, falls in love, kills her ex-lover, and then goes home with the relationship ruined forever. But we spend a lot of time at the base doing the war work, walking back and forth to the girlfriend’s apartment, and so on.
If you see these structural and other similarities as the key to the relationship between the two, then the differences become revealing and useful (and ChatGPT wasn’t at all wrong to recommended it). McEwan’s novel is told in the third person but narration is very close to Nick, the male protagonist; the focus of the novel is on the precipitating events rather than the aftermath (more “and this is how things ended up” rather than “and this is why things are as they are”). Both books are fairly research-based (the tunnelling is a real event in The Innocent, but the precipitating event is a fictional addition rather than a real grafting onto the real events of the past.
I’m not sure in the end that the bits where this differs are my favorites. I think the third-person narration has an unfortunate effect of forcing the main male character into a stereotype that is all too comforting to English readers: a kind of Lucky Jim (though less edgy here) that plays too easily to British conventions of brash Americans and naive young Englishmen that is really common it seems to me in middle-brow novels of the mid-twentieth century (it also contributes to a stereotype of Maria, the female character, who in these kinds of novels is usually much wiser and more far-seeing than the male; but since I think I share that problem, it isn’t a difference!).
Ditto for the focus on a non-historical event to give the war story some meat: I think I’d have found the novel even better if McEwan had somehow managed to propose something as an alternate history here. There is a little of this with one character: Blake in the apartment below is one of the Cambridge spies and his historical betrayal of the tunnel they built is adopted into the plot). But the actual heart of the story is a fiction that runs alongside these historical developments rather than is built out of them. The story would be no stronger or weaker if the entire background had been fictional as well, in my view.
And finally, I think that use of the “present” to serve as a kind of “where did they end up” coda really leaves some value on the table: while I’m not sure you could easily have had as shocking a precipitating event if you had focussed on the present (it would have been too hard to explain), there is a lot of space in that present for exploring how characters feel now about their pasts that felt rushed in this novel.
So all in all, a very well-selected, and not-at-all obvious comparator for me. It allows me to see how some things I’m doing work well when I see them done by an accomplished novelist (and others not), and it provides me with a chance to see where some potential alternate approaches (third person, detailed sex scenes as a structural element) may or may not work well for me. I’ll see if I can find some reviews of the novel to see what others thought of the structure, narration, plotting, etc.
