Double agent Ian McEwan’s newest novel about espionage and literature leads to a face-off in reviews

Double agent

Ian McEwan’s newest novel about espionage and literature leads to a face-off in reviews

One look at Sweet Tooth and you’d be forgiven for expecting a variation of George Smiley in a red dress. However, for all those expecting McEwan’s take on the seventies’ Britain and the circus of MI5, the biggest red herring in Sweet Tooth might be that cover. Serena Frome has a mundane job in the MI5 when, unexpectedly, she’s co-opted into an operation titled Sweet Tooth. Her task is to tap a young author named Tom Haley so that he writes fiction that attacks Soviet ideology. Serena promptly falls in love with him. He thinks she works for a foundation that has awarded him a stipend to write his novel. Eventually and inevitably, Tom finds out he’s been had, and then the real twist in the tale is revealed. Without giving too much away, let’s just say the star of Sweet Tooth is not Serena, but Tom. McEwan has clarified that he was too much of a “Bolshie” to be approached by the Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but aside from that detail, Tom is McEwan. Both are alumni of the University of Sussex, both are befriended by Martin Amis. No wonder the author said in an interview that Sweet Tooth is “a mutated version of a memoir”. Most importantly, Tom’s stories are taken from McEwan’s early work and the plot of Tom’s novel is the same as McEwan’s abandoned first novel. The novel is about a writer honing his craft, rather than the realistic details of McEwan’s youth. He constructs a distorted mirror image and this Lacanian writerly ego is Tom. It’s effectively like buying a good novel and getting a clutch of excellent short stories for free. Usually McEwan’s novels have a skilful layering of politics and plot. For example, despite not ever uttering the name “Thatcher”, A Child In Time contained unmistakable criticism of Thatcherism and its policies. In contrast, the only function of contemporary politics in Sweet Tooth is to create a laboratory for Serena’s heartbreaks. A few characters, like Tony Canning and Max Greatorex, suggest the possibility of political intrigue and end up being red herring-shaped anti-climaxes. Espionage is a literary affair in Sweet Tooth, which is a novel, not about spies and politics, but about storytelling. It explores the power dynamic between character and creator, and fiction and reality. McEwan teases the reader like a hustler doing a card trick. Serena appears to be the storyteller and we think she’s the one controlling our understanding of characters and events. In fact, she actually shapes the fiction in more ways than one. Near the end, however, it seems she was a puppet who was both watched and manipulated. Then comes the last line of the book, which tips the balance and reveals she was in control after all. Without her, there is no novel; and without a novel, there is no novelist. Whether or not you’re won over by meta-narratives or mirror stage theory, Sweet Tooth has something that is as rare as a unicorn in the world of literary fiction: a happy ending. Yes, the device of the tell-all letter is trite, but the romantic sort will forgive McEwan because with the last sentence of the novel, so many little details fall into place — Serena’s naivete and self-absorbed sentimentality; Tom’s charisma; the details that make Serena impatient but upon which the novel lingers. This novel may not the best example of McEwan’s craft, but it is fittingly, charmingly sweet. Disappointing is the only word for Ian McEwan’s latest, Sweet Tooth. That’s how his novels have been lately: well-crafted, well-planned, but a waste of time. I didn’t even bother with Solar, such was the dampening experience of On Chesil Beach (even though it fetched him his sixth Booker Prize nomination). It’s been downhill since Atonement; Saturday seemed like an aberration and I was sure the next novel would bring a return to form. So why pick up Sweet Tooth at all? First, there was the extract in the New Yorker. McEwan begins, as always, masterfully. “The end is already there in the beginning,” as promising writer Tom Haley tells narrator Serena Frome, his lover and satanic muse in the guise of guardian angel, near the climax. In the extract Frome recalls her preparation, by a much older lover during her Cambridge days, for a career in Britain’s domestic secret service, MI5. But plot summary tells you nothing about McEwan’s mastery: his economy of expression, the perfect pitch-tone-rhythm, and the forward propulsion of back-story. Assessing the craft of one of English’s best living writers is blasphemous, not just because of the acclaim but because his canon is the kind that motivates others to write. Just the memory of his early work’s wickedness or the haunting inquiry of my personal favourite, The Child In Time, is enough to get me at my keyboard and go off into the unknown; few others inspire you into the darkness that lurks beyond what we ordinarily write about. Try The Cement Garden or In Between The Sheets for the reading equivalent of plunging on a roller-coaster. Even The Daydreamer, his seven interlinked stories for children, beats Salman Rushdie’s sea of fiction for children. Then there’s the lure of a spy novel. McEwan’s The Innocent, a Cold War novel published at the end of the Cold War, was John le Carré taken up another literary level. The promise of a tale from a female agent of MI5 in the early 1970s could not be ignored. Perhaps it should have been. Sweet Tooth is an operation to promote — in the midst of a cultural Cold War — a non-communist writer. The operation goes awry; but the novel is a meditation on how writers are no less than spies. It is also a yarn that teasingly suggests how McEwan got his break. Within it are alternate takes on McEwan’s early stories, presented as works that Haley has written or is writing, including Sweet Tooth itself. (The fleeting synopses of fiction-within-fiction in Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels, by alter-ego and pulp-writer Kilgore Trout, were more playful.) Yes, all jolly well, but Sweet Tooth doesn’t quite satisfy the enthusiast’s literary sweet tooth. One wonders: should these British writers — McEwan, Martin Amis, le Carré, Rushdie — just stop writing, for Heaven’s sake? All started with a bang, but they now seem to mechanically crank out cold literary procedurals (though I haven’t read Rushdie’s memoir yet). The only one of this group who got better with age, Christopher Hitchens, is now dead. Is it that creative writing reaches its zenith in one’s youth? Not if you go by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (published One Hundred Years Of Solitude at 40) or Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes at 66). Had I not been a journalist, would I have written some wicked novels in my youth? Why did Hunter S Thompson shoot himself in the head? If I had been a writer in my youth, would I have produced my own Sweet Tooth, a pale reminder of what I had once been, but now just a waste of your time?