I’ve already heard people say the ending derails the book in the same way that the ending of Jonathan Coe’s most recent novel derailed the book but I don’t think the comparison is apt. As with Enduring Love and, to a lesser extent, Atonement the climax is somewhat divisive in that it arguably changes what you have read (and feeds into McEwan’s own recent comments about how he thinks first person narratives are too easy). Unlike William Boyd, though, whose own forays into spy fiction are stultifying with their lack of compulsion, McEwan has, for the most part, forged a compelling literary page turner (albeit a page-turner that, in the beginning, feels a little too jolly hockey sticks for its own good). McEwan wears his research on his sleeve and along the way we are gifted with a glimpse into the workings of MI5 built up through consumption of quite a number of books listed at the end of the novel (Stella Rimmington’s own memoirs provide McEwan with the wherewithal to forge a shadow of Rimmington here, for example). Of course she finds herself in a quandary and of course – the narrative imperative being what it is – of course events overtake her. Of course Serena is guilty about the way in which she is involved in secretly funnelling MI5 money to Tom. Of course, Serena and Tom end up embarking on an affair. Serena is given a writer, Tom Haley, and is sent to Brighton where he lives and works to offer him a grant, generous enough to allow him to write unimpeded by the concerns of wondering where the next meal would be coming from. Sweet Tooth is the cosy Brit equivalent of the grander US schemes by the CIA to infiltrate the culture, quietly encouraging writers and artists through a system of grants to produce art that hopefully propagates a way of looking at the world that supports their own particular interests. It is here, alongside a friendship with a chubby interesting commoner called Shirley Shilling and faltering relationship with a higher up with the seemingly preposterous name of Max Greatorex, that Serena is initiated into a scheme known as Sweet Tooth. Serena, the daughter of an austere, distant bishop and a gently tender mother with a nascent feminist streak and a desire for her beautiful, intelligent daughter to do well, is urged away from a desire to pursue a degree in English in favour of maths, and helped – thanks in part to a sad affair with a tutor who himself enjoyed a shady second life in the early postwar years – into a career in the secret service. ‘My name is Serena Frome,’ we are told at the novel’s opening, and then curiously (although less curiously when you’ve made your way to the end of the book) a short bracketed statement ‘(rhymes with plume)’ – ‘and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British security service.’ Herein lies the tale. And so to Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan’s allegedly biographical spy novel, a pleasing, tricksy beast with a subsumed sense of metatextuality likely to be as pleasing to his fans (and as frustrating to his detractors) as Atonement.
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