Tricksy reading: "Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, literary superstar. The astonishingly good Atonement and On Chesil Beach made it impossible not to buy and read his next book, Solar, which, though for me not so good, did not dilute the effect, which thus made Sweet Tooth a compulsory purchase. As with all the books mentioned above from the "second phase" McEwan (the first phase being rather more gothic), Sweet Tooth is deeply rooted in middle class Englishness, this time set, in what he has himself described as autobiographical style, in the late sixties and early seventies. 

The protagonist of the story, Serena Frome, "rhymes with 'plume'" as she tells us in the opening sentence of the book, is an Anglican bishop's daughter from comfortable middle class England, bright, beautiful, a compulsive and passionate reader (in spite of which she is pushed into half-heartedly studying mathematics at Cambridge), and temperamentally inclined to a soft-conservative view of the world, which prompts her not to join in the anti-system rebellion surrounding her in those years. The upheavals of the early seventies in dour, strike-ridden, industrially-declining and self-questioning Britain, are magnificently evoked in this book. McEwan recalls the moment, for example, when the standard of living in East Germany supposedly overtook that in the UK (a "fact", incidentally, I recall being mentioned by a precociously political friend of mine in the playground in our primary school), and describes civil servants working in underheated offices in overcoats, while coping with power cuts, the three-day week, IRA terrorism and the misbehaviour of "Six" (MI6). (In the acknowledgements, incidentally, I noticed one to a great book on the early seventies I raved about not so long ago.) 

But all this is background to Serena's story, which for all its ostensible connections with World Events, is really a very personal story. She is something of a drifter, through school and into university, from one rather fogey and/or much older lover to another (the sexual revolution is one in which, decidedly, she does participate), into a job in MI5... Yes, MI5. Serena is a spy, recruited for her conservative views and manifest, though slightly superficial abhorrence for the Soviet system, as well as for other reasons which become apparent later, by her older lover, a Cambridge don. 

Cold War, Cambridge don, MI5... So this is a spy thriller, right? Wrong. Serena is never more than a low cog in the MI5 machine, like most of the women in the environment firmly sidelined into clerical roles by the male hierarchy. The plot of the book revolves around a distinctly low-grade operation Serena participates in, the covert funding of conservatively-inclined authors to counter the dominant lefty consensus of intellectual pre-Thatcher Britain. (Shades of the CIA funded Encounter magazine here.) Her job is to recruit and manage a promising young author, Tom Haley, working at a new "plate glass" university in Sussex. She does her job, but rather typically, swiftly falls in love with the young man, who uses the money he rather uncritically receives from a mysterious front "foundation", to wine and dine his new girlfriend and generally live a very delightful existence contrasting sharply with the bleak seventies Britain around them. He also manages to write, starting to fulfil the promise the spymasters (and Serena) saw in him. The snag is, of course, that Serena is caught, lying to her lover about her job and where the money is coming from, and terrified of the consequences should the truth ever emerge. Which ultimately, of course, it does.

The story is told fluently and amusingly. McEwan shows a light touch, largely sympathetic to his characters - Tom Haley indeed is a substantially autobiographical figure - and keeps the pages turning nicely throughout. Real public figures, largely from the literary world, pop up at intervals, along with references to McEwan's own life in that period. But, of course, this is McEwan, so there's something else. What else, we discover in a big reveal at the end of the book, a twist à la Atonement which means we have to go back and think again about much of what has happened. Such literary tricksiness, something of which the character Serena heartily disapproves in her own hyper-abundant reading, refocuses attention on the amount of reading we encounter throughout the book, and indeed makes this a book as much about the acts of reading and writing as it is about spies, MI5, seventies Britain or the ups and downs, professional and romantic, of a rather endearing posh girl.

Would I recommend you read it? 

Yes.