The Innocent (Ian McEwan)
Every week in The Observer someone gets asked about their taste in books. One of the most interesting questions is: ‘Which living author is the most overrated?’. I’m never going to be interviewed by them, so I can reveal my answer here and now: it’s Ian McEwan.
It’s a total mystery to me why he is held in such high esteem in the UK. Is it because we’ve got nothing better to celebrate? Of living writers, there is Kazuo Ishiguro, John Banville (oh, alright, not from the UK) and Julian Barnes, to name only three, who tower over him. I find his style very aloof, pedestrian and pompous. His novel Saturday was one of the worst novels I’ve read recently.
The Innocent, according to the blurb on the back cover, ‘ensures McEwan’s major status’. I’m not really sure that that quote makes any sense at all. Whatever ‘major status’ might be, it’s not worth having, if this is what ensures it. It concerns a naive surveillance technician (Leonard Marnham) from Dollis Hill and his affair with a feisty young Berliner called Maria. The affair, the way it begins, the way it almost ends, everything about it are ridiculous. Initially, Leonard exhibits a painful lack of experience in bed, but within a few pages has turned into a domination freak.
Maria’s ex-husband Otto has a key part to play, and this really is the most ridiculous part of the entire story. McEwan is famous, if anything, for surgical accuracy. Here, his characters chop up Otto and wrap him in water-proof plastic, then haul him around Berlin in two boxes. And get away with it.
But the real curse of McEwan’s method is research. It’s the novelistic equivalent of putting the dreaded words ‘based on a true story’ at the start of a film. McEwan can’t help but tell you how thorough his research is, and he lays it all out for you in an afterword. But no amount of research can mask the leadenness of the writing. To judge from Saturday, written a full 15 years after The Innocent, not much has changed. The detail that he lavishes there on a squash game and, later, a brain operation are enough to make you want a lobotomy. And the conclusion in which a home invasion is foiled by quoting poetry is just risible.
The Innocent is a pretentious attempt to write a Berlin-based thriller, a sub-genre that I normally can’t get enough of. It looks down its nose at the ‘mere’ spy thriller, as though creative writing course trickery is somehow superior to storytelling. My advice? If you want a great Berlin-based spy thriller, look no further than Len Deighton’s wonderful Game, Set, Match trilogy. Don’t bother with The Innocent.
The Class (Hermann Ungar)
Hermann Ungar was completely unknown to me until I read a review of this translation, I think in the Guardian book review, and added it to my list of books to read. I’m glad I did.
Ungar belongs to the generation of novelists who wrote between the wars, in German. He was a German speaking Jew from Moravia, and so, unsurprisingly, attracts comparisons with Kafka.
Ungar’s concerns in this novel seem closely related to Kafka’s in his three (all unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime). The Class was published in 1927, a year before the author’s death, and two years after the publication of The Trial. I don’t know whether Ungar was aware of Kafka’s work, although one must suppose that he was, even in its bowdlerised form as it was then published.
The Class concerns Josef Blau, a school teacher from inauspicious origins who imagines himself to be persecuted by his class of young boys. There are some striking scenes of strange beauty, such as his fainting fit on a school outing after which he hides from a pupil, although it later transpires that the pupil had known where he was.
Blau’s jealousy of his fiancee is such that he believes her to be conducting an affair with his kindly colleague Herr Leopold, even though they have barely exchanged a word and she is pregnant with Blau’s child.
There is the grotesque Uncle Bobek, a drunkard, glutton and sponger who has formed an attachment to the fiancee’s mother with whom they all live. There is the sinister and unfathomable Modlizki who was a friend of Blau’s as a child but who has not benefited from the same social elevation. He is the eminence grise of the piece.
For those who love Kafka, and who can never hope to unearth any further masterpieces of his, however unfinished, fragmentary or otherwise flawed they may be, I recommend the work of Hermann Ungar: his novel The Maimed is somewhere on my never-ending list of future reading.
