On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever

Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (Knopf, digital galley via edelweiss) is a sly wink, a puff of smoke and a few mirrors. Pretending to write a spy novel, McEwan has gone all “tricksy” — his word, not mine — on us with a story that has little to do with actual espionage but everything to do with deceit. All writers are spies, don’t you know, in cahoots with readers. Double agents everywhere. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Narrator Serena Frome (rhymes with “plume”) is a pretty, blonde maths student at Cambridge circa 1970, a voracious, indiscriminate reader of paperback novels who is enamored with Solzhenitsyn and a married history tutor of her father’s generation. Tony Canning once worked for MI5, and, over the course of their idyllic but mostly secret affair, he grooms her for the intelligence service before unceremoniously dumping her and disappearing. Still, Serena accepts a lowly clerical job at MI5 — the only kind of position open in the security service to young women of the era.

Readers know from the get-go that Serena’s days as a spy are numbered because she announces it in the first paragraph, looking back some 40 years: “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.”

This lover  doesn’t show up for awhile as Serena describes her ascent as a fledgling Cold Warrior; she makes a couple of friends, reads incessantly, wonders if her bedsit has been searched, keeps up with current politics (Heath, miners, IRA) and is eventually dispatched to clean up a safe house. But this serves as prelude to her part in Sweet Tooth, an operation by which MI5 indulges in cultural warfare, secretly funding certain writers through fake foundation grants. Serena’s mission is to approach Tom Haley, a young writer of fiction and journalism, and offer him a stipend so he can take time off from teaching and write a novel. Just don’t tell him where the money’s coming from.

You may think you know where this is going, and you may be right, although McEwan veers off into meta-fiction to offer several of Tom Haley’s short stories, which strongly resemble McEwan’s early works. (Tom also shares some autobiographical details with McEwan, including friends such as Martin Amis.) Serena reads Tom’s stories, thinks she “knows” him, and falls in love and into bed. Although MI5 would never tell its secret writers what to write, Serena knows that Tom’s bleak, dystopian novel of father and daughter is so not what they had in mind.

Both Serena and Tom are a bit earnest, narcissistic and smug, in the way of young university graduates. McEwan serves their eventual comeuppance with a quick twist, which hardly surprises if you’ve been paying attention.

Sweet Tooth isn’t a masterpiece like Atonement, nor does it offer the emotional depths of  On Chesil Beach and Enduring Love. If you want to read a McEwan spy tale, go back to noirish The Innocent. Think of Sweet Tooth as a well-written entertainment, a playful exercise in literary sleight-of-hand.  Or should that be slight-of-hand?