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Summary
Summary
Winner of such prestigious honors as the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award, Ian McEwan is justifiably regarded as a modern master. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth follows Cambridge student Serena Frome, whose intelligence and beauty land her a job with England's intelligence agency, MI5. In an attempt to monitor writers' politics, MI5 tasks Serena with infiltrating the literary circle of author Tom Healy. But soon matters of trust and identity subvert the operation.
Author Notes
Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell.
He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
A reliable pleasure in Ian McEwan's work has always been the brilliance of his openings. Whether he's aiming for the big set-piece, as in the ballooning scene of Enduring Love, or something more like the casual stealth of the couple's afternoon awakening in The Comfort of Strangers, his tales cast their spells quickly and irresistibly. One reads him, of course, with the expectation of a story in which something terrible will occur, and that expectation is now a part of the alchemy. Fraught questions begin seething almost immediately in the reader's mind. Who is going to be harmed? Will the harm be emotional, physical, or both? In what richly inventive ways will the setting Dorset coast, south of France wilderness facilitate the inevitable crisis? And what kinds of meaning are going to be implicated in it? The new novel, Sweet Tooth, is no exception. Set mostly in London during the early 70s, it is told (in hindsight from the present day) by Serena Frome, a bishop's daughter brought up in the genteel "walled garden" of a cathedral precinct. We learn in the first paragraph that she was sent on a secret mission 40 years ago, and that it ended badly for her and her lover. Almost a hundred pages pass before we discover the precise nature of this mission; a more leisurely prelude than usual, but just as mesmerising as its predecessors, with every page adding some new hint that deepens or adjusts our sense of what is going to be at stake in Serena's story. In the post-60s England of strikes, bomb blasts, oil crises, cold war escalation, ideological grandstanding and generally impending anarchy, old-fashioned Serena reads Solzhenitsyn and pledges herself against the evils of communism. A history tutor at Cambridge an older man named Canning, who has a mysterious scar recruits her, first as his mistress, then as a spy for MI5. He refines her cold-warrior instincts with heavy doses of Churchill, and disciplines her patriotism with an informed sense of England's glorious past. We seem to be heading for a story of civilisation versus barbarism; the "seedy, careless insurrection" (as Serena puts it) of the 70s played off against the self-sacrificing heroism of the second world war generation, with Canning's mystery somewhere at the centre. But no: Canning dumps Serena with sudden and (to her) inexplicable cruelty, disappearing out of the story for a long time, and as Serena takes up her career at MI5 other themes emerge. An office intrigue starts up, bringing the subject of sexual politics into play (the pervasive condescension of men towards women in that not-so-long-ago era is reconstructed with painful accuracy). An IRA surveillance operation suggests terrorism may turn out to be the main focus, with perhaps a connection to Middle East tensions and the PLO. Meanwhile, frequent allusions to the eastern bloc keep the topic of totalitarianism firmly in view, and as Serena begins to demonstrate some totalitarian instincts of her own (she opens a file on a headmaster who attended a meeting of his local Communist party), it looks as if some kind of study in east-west political symmetries might be afoot. Then again, a mysteriously moved bookmark in Serena's room tilts the story towards something more paranoid: is the young spy being spied on? With all these possibilities in the air, it seems certain that the mission, one way or another, will be intricately bound up with the more significant conflicts of that discordant era. Given McEwan's ability to make rivetingfiction out of English politics (not easy), it would be hard to imagine anyone better equipped to write such a story. When Serena is finally summoned to the fifth floor, we accompany her with serious interest and suspense. It comes as a surprise amusing but faintly disconcerting that one of the first things the five men waiting up there ask her to do is to rank the novelists William Golding, Kingsley Amis and David Storey in order of merit. Serena's bookishness, it turns out, is what interests them. Their project is to co-opt some writers of a leftish but non-communist bent, with a view to influencing the British intelligentsia away from its increasingly anti-western bias. They have some journalists and academics already lined up, and now they've decided they need a novelist. The plan is for Serena to pose as the representative of a cultural foundation with money to bestow, and reel in some promising newcomer. The person they have in mind is a PhD student at Sussex who has published some well-received short stories, along with some articles criticising the Soviet bloc. One resists, slightly, the literary turn. Still, manipulation of the intelligentsia has a deep history on both sides of the iron curtain: the Stasi had a whole department dedicated to infiltrating the peace movement, and as Serena's handlers point out the CIA bankrolledEncounter magazine, so perhaps the tale may yet go somewhere deep and dangerous. But as Serena begins reading the writer's stories, summarising them at length in her own text, it begins to look, unexpectedly, as if the book's real subject is in fact going to be its own navel, or at least its own author. The young writer's name is Tom Haley, but aside (one assumes) from the compromising entanglement with an MI5 operative, it might as well be Ian McEwan. Most of Haley's stories turn out to be versions of the dazzling pieces that launched McEwan's own career in the 70s. The career itself, from Sussex graduate to prize-winning young Cape novelist, bears a close resemblance to McEwan's own. It's not just a case of thrifty recycling of material, or some jokey glimpse of the director in his own movie: Haley/McEwan's debut as a writer now takes centre-stage in the novel, with Serena (who falls in love with him even as she suborns him with tainted MI5 lucre) chronicling his literary tastes and habits, his reactions to his own growing success, his early encounters with Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton (of the New Review), Cape's Tom Maschler, and so on. It's unclear to me exactly what McEwan is after with this abrupt swerve into self-reflexiveness. Sometimes he seems to be enjoying the trip down memory lane purely for its own sake, sketching his old pals and their hangouts with nostalgic affection. Sometimes he seems to be wanting to give his younger self a good mugging for his youthful affectations (Haley starts living on Chablis and oysters, buys an Asprey's silver ice bucket, and announces that "all men should have a 'library' of white shirts"), and perhaps also for some more obscure sense of having let himself become a creature of the "establishment". Sometimes he seems interested in using the relationship between spy and author as a metaphor for the intricate dance of concealment and trust that goes on between a reader and a writer. Like Henry Perowne inSaturday, Serena strongly dislikes novels that play games with their readers "no tricksy haggling over the limits of their art", she declares; "no showing disloyalty to the reader by appearing to cross and recross in disguise the borders of the imaginary" so there's an elaborate joke at her expense (but to what end?) as she finds herself at the heart of just such a novel. Depending on your tastes, you may find these recursive twists and turns delicious. It's certainly all fairly good fun to read, and the consolidation of the plot around the questions of how Serena is going to square her love with her treachery, and whether Haley's dystopian novel (based on McEwan's story "Two Fragments") is going to win the Austen prize, and if so whether his secret debt to MI5 is going to come out, is gripping in its own way even if that turns out to be more John Fowles than John le Carré. But those questions don't in any plausible way substitute for the earlier, more momentous political questions. No doubt it's callow to hold a writer to his word, or his implied word, but after that scene on the fifth floor I couldn't help feeling like Echo in the myth when Narcissus catches sight of himself in the pool. "What about the IRA?" I heard myself bleating inwardly as the book began fixating on its own reflection. What about the PLO? The cold war? Civilisation and barbarity? You promised! James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.
New York Review of Books Review
IAN McEWAN'S work falls into two distinct periods. His early stories and novels were all cool post-1960s perversity, a high-end parade of deadpan macabre and kink and sideshow eccentricity: ghastly death, corpses and butchery, bestiality, incest and pedophilia, insanity, dwarves. But since he turned 50, around the turn of the century, he's published lovely historical fiction about the disastrous sexual misunderstandings of youth ("Atonement," "On Chesil Beach"), and contemporary fiction about an alternative-energy researcher ("Solar") and a deeply sane, happily married surgeon ("Saturday"). It's as if Johnny Rotten had changed into Bono. And in the same way I like both the Sex Pistols and U2, I've enjoyed the best of McEwan's fiction in both modes. "Sweet Tooth," his new novel, is definitely mature McEwan, intermittently funny and much more sweet than bitter, about as entertaining as a very intelligent novel can be and vice versa. Even though the story is set inside a cold war espionage operation, no violence occurs - indeed, only one (secondary) character dies, of natural causes, and only after he's exited the story. The narrator and heroine, Serena Frome, is the elder daughter of an Anglican bishop who, she says, "I don't think . . . had ever been in a shop." "Nothing strange or terrible happened to me during my first 18 years" in the 1950s and '60s, "and that is why I'll skip them." She "was both clever and beautiful," and reminds us again 10 pages later: "I really was pretty." Her mother persuades her to fulfill her "duty as a woman to go to Cambridge to study maths," where she promptly learns "what a mediocrity I was in mathematics." What Serena really enjoys is reading fiction. "Reading was my way of not thinking. I didn't bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in." Her tastes are defiantly un-snobbish: she amuses university friends with her insistence that "'Valley of the Dolls' was as good as anything Jane Austen ever wrote," and she discovers Solzhenitsyn right after reading Ian Fleming's "Octopussy." Although she "took the orthodox view of our generation" concerning the Vietnam War, the fiction she reads turns her into a young anti-Communist in the soft-on-Communism academia of the early '70s. "I was also the first person in the world to understand Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'" She's not quite Emma Bovary, ruined by the fiction she inhales, but "those books delivered me to my career in intelligence." She has a brief affair with a middle-aged history tutor who in turn gets her recruited by MI5, the domestic counterespionage service. Compared with the lavish attention McEwan often devotes to physical description, "Sweet Tooth" is light on telling period detail. "It pleased us, the general excitement in the air in 1969," Serena says early on, and again, not many pages later: "A seedy, careless insurrection was in the air." But we're mainly obliged to take the countercultural atmosphere on faith, with the exception of some funny passages involving Serena's hippie sister, Lucy, who lives "rent-free with another woman, a circus-skills instructor." "Without asking too many impertinent questions, the state paid the rent and granted a weekly pension to artists, out-of-work actors, musicians, mystics, therapists and a network of citizens for whom smoking cannabis and talking about it was an engrossing profession." Lucy's boyfriend is one of these, doing "that inexcusable thing that men who liked cannabis tended to do, which was to go on about it . . . Our parents had the war to be boring about. We had this." Yet Serena's distaste for "this inglorious revolution" is more a matter of sensibility than ideology; she is a young fogy on instinct rather than principle. "I believed in nothing much - not carols, not even rock music" Against the conformist nonconformity of her fellow youth, she enjoys being a (secret) nonconformist. "It gave me some innocent pleasure to think how horrified the counterculture crowd around us would be, to know that we were the ultimate enemy from the 'straight' gray world of MI5." Organizing an undercover operation code-named Sweet Tooth, this fictional MI5 contrives to pay long-term stipends, through a front foundation, to 10 up-and-coming writers. They didn't need to be cold war fanatics, merely "skeptical about utopias in the East or looming catastrophe in the West." The hope, one of the bosses tells her, is that they'd "turn out well and become, you know, important. This is a slow-burn thing." Because Serena knows contemporary literature, she gets the assignment to recruit the young fiction writer Tom Haley. They promptly begin an affair and fall in love. She keeps him in the dark about his true patrons. Meanwhile, her adulterous "old MI5 hand" turns out to have been a Communist asset, putting his protégé Serena under suspicion. As in any spy story, it's unclear who's lying to whom until late in the game. For all the modish noir of his early work, McEwan has always been a good old-fashioned teller of tales, and the suspense and surprises in this book are well engineered. Most big-time novelists sooner or later write a novel or two about books and writers, and this is not McEwan's first iteration. Its true subject is not espionage but, as in "Atonement," the porous boundaries between the imaginary and the real -and, as in "Atonement," he's got a large metafictional trick up his sleeve. In other words, if I may indulge in my own metanonfictional swerve, "Sweet Tooth" is "a novel about the powerful influence literature can exert on life" - as a reviewer last summer wrote in these pages about my own latest book, also a circa-1970 story concerning an upper-middle-class fiction-besotted baby boomer girl who reads Ian Fleming and plays at espionage with duplicitous friends, also narrated by the rueful heroine four decades later. Serena tells Tom (and us) again and again that she has no use for the illusion-busting postmodern novelists he adores. "I wasn't impressed by those writers . . . who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions I believed that writers were paid to pretend." And, later: "No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and self-consistent as the actual." McEwan, however, has his cake and eats it, until the last chapter keeping us unaware of the metafictional con under way. Instead of flaunting it, in 20th-century spoilsport fashion, he uses his game to reinforce and deepen the pleasurable illusions of reality, thereby satisfying conservative readers like Serena as well as those like Tom with a taste for the Jiterary fun house. Even before the reveal, "Sweet Tooth" playfully hops and skips along the borders of make-believe and reality. Unlike her coworkers, who tell family and friends they work for MI5, Serena unnecessarily gives a cover story, turning herself into a kind of fictional character. A colleague warns her that in intelligence work "the line between what people imagine and what's actually the case can get very blurred. ... You imagine things - and you can make them come true." She's happy to indulge Tom's masochistic sexual conceit that she's cuckolding him with Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, "a deliberate and shared fantasy . . . usefully diluting my own necessary untruths." But sex with a writer also unnerves her: "I couldn't banish the thought that he was quietly recording our lovemaking for future use, that he was making mental notes." McEWAN studs the novel with well-known Britons, both named (his former publisher, his former editor, his friend Martin Amis) and lightly fictionalized. The future MI5 director Stella Rimington is "Millie Trimingham"; the book's ambitious undergraduate editor Rona Kemp ("She went on to Vogue . . . and then to an incendiary rise and fall, starting new magazines in Manhattan") seems highly Tina Brownian; and Tom Haley is almost indistinguishable from McEwan himself. Serena summarizes a half dozen of Haley's short stories, several of which are recognizable as versions of McEwan's fiction from the 1970s. "Sweet Tooth" is sort of a younger sibling to "Atonement," less epic and grave, with lower stakes, more fun and an apparently happier ending. Tom is a self-consciously autobiographical figure, but one throwaway line of Serena's - "And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful" - could be an animating truth for McEwan as a writer. "Sweet Tooth" is extremely clever in both the British and American senses (smart as well at amusingly tricky) and his most cheerful book by far. Kurt Andersen is the author, most recently, of the novel "True Believers."