The Innocent received some rave reviews, so I decided to check it out. It’s the story of an NKVD officer who is forced to make difficult choices between his career and his personal life.
It’s difficult to take such a book seriously. Who can possibly have any sympathy for a member of the NKVD (the organisation that became the MGB and then the KGB)?
The story is such that we can’t have any empathy here because the choice the main character forced to make is simply between doing the right thing or not. There’s no moral ambiguity of any kind in his decision. It is 1948, and our NKVD agent, Aleksandr, is sent to a psychiatric clinic in the Urals to investigate whether one of the inmates, formerly a famous pianist, is faking incapacity following injuries in the war.
The narrative is intercut with later events, such as the Munich Olympics, the Fischer-Spassky chess match in Reykjavik and West Germany beating the USSR in the European Championship final. There’s very little gained by this intercutting, and the events referred to are largely irrelevant to the narrative.
The Innocent sets out to examine how ordinary people can become agents for a state that is actively ruining thousands of innocent lives on a day to day basis. It’s not surprising that it fails to deliver the insights required to answer such a profound question. It’s a well enough written book, but is certainly not deserving of the reception it received.
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