Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan (2012)
PR6063.C4
S94 2012
Knowing
that Sweet Tooth is a Jane Austen
romance, post-modern, Russian doll, Künstlerroman nestled within a spy
story doesn’t make it any less enjoyable or compelling. Ian McEwan has written
a superb personal novel from the point of view of a complex female narrator which
at times is a thriller, a glimpse into the writer's craft, and a psychological
study within the framework of universal themes: love, betrayal, and redemption.
The first paragraph of the book introduces the structure of Sweet Tooth,
“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost 40 years ago I was sent
on a secret mission for the British security service. I didn't return safely.
Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and
ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing." The
unfolding of the story is how these events came to pass some forty years ago
places the beginning of the narrative in the United Kingdom of the 1970’s. Serena
is a beautiful and brilliant Cambridge student who is recruited to join the
British M15 and whose mission is to counter Soviet supported writers by
infiltrating and supporting British literary circles of up-and-coming writers in
a psych-ops mission to, hopefully, promote anti-communist writings. Along the
way we are treated to all manner and sorts of musings, contemplations, thoughts
and discussions - all of which are integral to the story. Lingering on the
novel’s side-streets (against the pull of the narrative) is one of the many
pleasures of Sweet Tooth, such as the discussion of Philip Larkin’s “The
Whitsun Weddings” or Joyce’s “The Dead.” One of many intrigues of Sweet Tooth
as a nominal spy novel set in the UK of the 1970’s is that the presence of
United States is more deeply felt than the peripheral Soviet Union which has
the added benefit for American readers of seeing (and learning about) ourselves
in the 1970’s as others saw us even as UK readers revisit their history as
their country continues to pull itself out of the aftermath of the Second World
War.
Sweet Tooth is also a novel about writing, the role of the author and
the relationship of the author to the characters. References made to writers
including: Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Edward Thomas, W. H. Auden, Arthur
Miller, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Robert Lowell, T. S.
Eliot and Martin Amis, a friend of McEwan’s. Sweet Tooth is dedicated to
Christopher Hitchens and the discussion of “The Whitsun Weddings” was an actual
conversation between McEwan and Hitchens.
But, underlying the book is Serena’s knowledge of probability and chance
which, like in the writings of John Fowles (acknowledged by McEwan), such as The
French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus, provides the jumping off point of the
novel and very much informs Sweet Tooth in those eighteen recounted months of
the events of the 1970’s.
