Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Perhaps because of the movie, Atonement is Ian McEwan’s best-known novel and, like this one, deals with the decisions people make, and how, at some point, life turns because of something we did at a time when we didn’t realise it could catch up with us.
The tale feels less dark, though, even when in Sweet Tooth McEwan delves into the world of espionage in Britain circa 1970. It’s not too bleak a world, at least not the one he sketches.
His protagonist is a young varsity graduate who is urged by her mother to study maths rather than fiction, which is her real interest.
In fact, her reading habits immediately draw you into the character. She switches easily from Ian Fleming to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and declares loudly that Valley of the Dolls is a far better read than any Jane Austen novel.
Yes, she catches your attention in an almost flirty fashion, and then she’s also pretty, which makes people around her sit up and take notice. She has a relationship with a history tutor, who manages to get her recruited into MI5, the domestic intelligence service, which sounds much more exciting than was the reality – as our heroine soon discovers, living a life that is deadly dull.
Until they create a scam called Sweet Tooth, which cons writers to take a bogus company’s money and hopefully write things that the service wants in the public domain. (Sounds almost a bit like the Info Scandal, but not quite.)
Either way, this is McEwan’s foray into espionage. He admitted in an interview that he even had lunch with the master of the genre, John le Carré, to get a sense of how to tackle this world.
What is intriguing is where he plans to take his reader. It’s much less an espionage tale, in the sense of following spies and catching defectors, than leading you down a path that becomes all about dealing in what is real and what is fiction, or the characters’ or writer’s fantasy world.
It is the kind of game McEwan loves to play as he turns what readers expect upside down and inside out. The narrator and pretty lass at the centre of the tale, Serena Frome, enters this cloak-and-dagger world. But far from turning it into an intriguing game of finding people working against the state, hers becomes a rather drab world of dreary work and too little money. In a certain way she almost creates all the drama in her life on her own.
But, of course, the author is not going to allow things to unravel so simply since McEwan likes playing games – and you have to assume that when dealing in espionage he’s going to work twice as hard to deliver the knock-out blow. It’s game on from the first page and fun to see if you can follow the lead. – Diane de Beer