Sweet Tooth

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I am not sure if I needed to read Sweet Tooth, but as a literary spy novel (not quite a thriller) it entertained me well enough. One thing Ian McEwan seems to manage – I say this without proper qualification – is to write a novel from the point of view of a young woman quite convincingly. There’s a bit of a twist on this premise at the end, which you are most welcome to guess at.

Serena Frome is a bishop's daughter. The bishop seems a decent man but clearly not close to his family, and embarrassed by anything he can’t sort out from behind a desk. She heads to Cambridge to study Mathematics, being good at it, but sadly not a genius. At university, she starts to write a column on her reading of literature in what one imagines are well-phrased but not necessarily wise reviews. She meets her first boyfriend, and then falls for a married professor – an MI5 man – and so her secretive career begins.

It is the 1970s and the Cold War is in full swing. Frome’s conservative beliefs, combined with her knowledge of literature, interest MI5 (or it might be her former relationship with her Cambridge fellow). Adopting this point of view allows McEwan to portray events that are now historic with a certain perspective unlikely to be his own, and his gentle fun in this respect increases when he introduces a novelist into the plot. MI5 have decided that it would be a good thing to have a writer under their influence, one who might counter the trendy sympathy for the East. Frome sets out to recruit him, but goes a step further when she becomes the writer's lover. 

The plot must unravel from this point. The mask slips and the papers get a scent, and love that might have been forever comes crashing down. That’s the spy novel (not quite a thriller) in action as it meets with a library-dwelling cousin. Apart from resolving such matters and ending things cleverly, the other enjoyable part of the book is Frome’s summary of the short fiction of Tom Haley – whose early work, it seems, is quite the thing. The idea of being a literary bad-boy with money is so far removed from the contemporary Australian scene that one can only imagine the early lives of I. McEwan and J. Barnes and M. Amis as works of fiction of themselves.

If you are well into this book and are unsure about whether you need to keep reading, hang in there. Hear the writer’s plea. ‘Don’t walk away now, Serena. Keep reading’ (p. 306).


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