Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Previously published in the Herald Magazine.

Ian McEwan’s latest protagonist, the ‘actually rather gorgeous’ Serene Frome is an avid reader. Though she voraciously devours all literature, she generally ‘preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but .. didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but (she) liked someone to say “Marry me” by the end’. Serena’s literary tastes are telling of McEwan’s latest book, the strange, annoying, arresting Sweet Tooth, which is very much about people in and out of love while trying out careers and (no spoilers here) ends with a very odd proposal. 

Serena is an avid reader, writes some anti-communism columns while at university and is subsequently prepped in the early 1970s for an MI5 interview by her lover, the much older university professor, Tony Canning, who himself had been an agent. Even though Tony unceremoniously dumps Serena quite literally by the roadside before her interview, she sails through, confessing ‘I had never in my life been so clever as during that interview’. Of course all this is entirely pointless when she finds that she is to be hired a clerical level because ‘men and women had separate career tracks’. With presumably no serious spy vs spy Le Carre-esque action to come her way otherwise, Serena is glad to be offered a role in operation ‘Sweet Tooth’, a project not unlike the CIA and MI6 jointly funded1953 UK cultural magazine Encounter Acting under cover, Serena is to offer a local writer enough funding to write full time and to encourage him to write a novel that is pro-establishment. By the time Serena meets Tom Haley, she feels she already knows him - as does McEwan’s reader, via Haley’s short stories that Serena is to read as research - stories that hold very true to McEwan’s own voice, ringing clearly with the elements of betrayal and human perversity that are familiar to any of McEwan’s readers. Serena and Haley throw themselves into a relationship with complete abandon, and McEwan’s readers follow along, never being given any reason to believe that Serena is anything but the most truthful of narrators. After all, she’s already told us on the novel’s very first page that within ‘eighteen months of joining (the MI5) I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover’. 

Serena is an odd protagonist, who in the hands of anyone but the skillful McEwan would miserably fail to engage the reader. She seems to drift along, pushed by her mother into her college degree, pushed by her lover into MI5, never looking for any real meaning in life, explaining lazily ‘I was doing nothing. I didn’t know. A chance had come my way and I was taking it…I had little else going on. So why not?’  This is McEwan being his usual clever self, with a steady, strong manipulation of his reader and the narrative in the very ways that Serena claims to mistrust and dislike in modern literature. While Sweet Tooth itself may not have the plot of a serious spy novel, it has the ability to manage your understanding of it in a way an experienced spy may - everything is finely crafted, preempted by a force much more intelligent than you. It is only at the end of the book that its epigraph suddenly make sense: ‘ If only I had met, on this search, a single clearly evil person’.