The Innocent: Or the Special Relationship

A true story of the Berlin Tunnel or Operation Gold, the abortive brainchild of the CIA and MI6.

Editorial Reviews

Review "Never less than wholly entertaining." --"The Wall Street Journal"

"Deft, taut fiction.... Many English writers have been compared to Evelyn Waugh, often wrongly, but this book can stand with the master's best." --"Time"

"So exhaustively suspenseful that it should be devoured at one sitting.... McEwan fuses a spy-novel plot with themes as venerable as the myth of Adam and Eve." --"Newsweek"

"Has the spooky, crooked-angled, danger-around-every-corner feeling of a Carol Reid film. It reminded me often of The Third Man and that is no mean feat." --Jonathan Carroll, "The Washington Post Book World"

"Powerful and disturbing... a tour de force." --"The New York Times"

From the Inside Flap The setting is Berlin. Into this divided city, wrenched between East and West, between past and present; comes twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham, assigned to a British-American surveillance team. Though only a pawn in an international plot that is never fully revealed to him, Leonard uses his secret work to escape the bonds of his ordinary life -- and to lose his unwanted innocence. The promise of his new life begins to be fulfilled as Leonard becomes a crucial part of the surveillance team, while simultaneously being initiated into a new world of love and sex by Maria, a beautiful young German woman. It is a promise that turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening -- a night when Leonard Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed.

"From the Paperback edition. </div