This book by Ian McEwan is a deviation from my usual reviews, since it is a fiction book. I decided to post a review of it because it is based on historical events that I found interesting, and I selected it for our book club. I learned about the book after reading “Spycatcher, The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Office” by Peter Wright. In the review of that book, I wrote,

“The book presents an astonishing contrast between the British and Soviet intelligence operations. Seldom is there mention of any Soviet secrets being collected by the British unless the Soviets wanted the British to know the secret. Practically every British secret of any importance was known by the Soviets, and Stalin often knew it before it had filtered through the British bureaucracy.” With that introduction, the book “The Innocent” is about a young and naive Brit who was assigned to prepare equipment for recording information gathered from Soviet communication lines that the English and Americans had reached by digging a tunnel under the streets of Berlin. “Gehlen’s men” were former Nazis hired by the CIA to dig the tunnel. They successfully completed the tunnel, tapped the lines, and recorded massive amounts of coded Soviet messages. They didn’t know until they had committed massive resources to decoding the messages that the Soviets had been told about the tunnel when it was in its planning stages by George Blake, who was a British intelligence agent and a Soviet spy. For those who might be interested in “Operation Gold,” the CIA has an interesting description.

All of that would make people to believe a fictional book with a plot based on the tunnel and some of the people working in it would be interesting. However, several book club members instead judged the book to be boring. I’ll extract comments recorded by each of them in the “blue book,” which is the official record for the “Denver Read and Feed Book Club .”

“I had a tough time with this book. Slow to start and when the plot turned, it was not an improvement.” Tara

“Certainly the start was not eventful, but I felt the drabness and sense of loss…that the author wished to portray in Berlin at the time.” Frank

“The book started slowly and ended 70 pages longer than it should.” Paul

“The dismemberment was just another story (you’ll have to read the book to learn about that) where I keep marveling over the character’s stupid decisions…” Barb

“Writing was too dry. I agree with Barb.” Stephanie

“I like how the author writes…But…was very slow and dull.” Cathy

“The dullness of the beginning served as a jarring and exciting juxtaposition to the end.” Sally

“I enjoyed the descriptions of espionage that is historically-based.” Farrel

I couldn’t find a comment from Steve, except that he gave it a score of perfect mediocrity, which is a 5. It is surprising the book scored an average of 5.9 on a scale of 1-10 considering those dominantly negative reviews.