Kurt Anderson of the NY Times Sunday Book Review writes that 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." (emphasis mine, I love that last line)
I agree with Anderson and must say that from a personal perspective, I have tended to enjoy his earlier novels better - save for Atonement, which is one of his masterpieces.
One of the things that usually characterises a McEwan novel is the major event or disturbance which upsets or ends each book. This is so much a part of what I have come to expect from him that I was surprised, when I got more than halfway through Sweet Tooth, to find that nothing alarming had yet happened. When I read Atonement I had to put the book down at one stage in order to process the disturbing series of events he had outlined. When I finished The Comfort of Strangers I had to physically put the book out of sight so that I could turn my mind to something else instead of allowing it to come back, again and again, to the horrific scenes McEwan is so very good at describing. As my mother says, one generally needs to bolster oneself before picking up one of his novels.
Sweet Tooth is different. Anderson calls it McEwan's "most cheerful book by far", which says something about the rest of his work given that this is a book about espionage during the Cold War.
Selena Frome is a voracious reader and lover of books. Because she is also, by fluke, rather good at mathematics, her mother encourages her to read maths at Cambridge rather than English at a lesser university. Surprisingly, after earning a rather poor degree, Serena is then recruited by MI5, where she is soon assigned a case. Operation Sweet Tooth involves the confidential funding by MI5 of writers who, the Government hopes, will one day become known for works that espouse anti-communist values, and Tom Haley is the writer assigned to Selena. They fall in love and have an affair that destroys any hope she has of career success - not that this was a real possibility anyway in the intensely chauvinistic environment of MI5 during the 1970s. The love affair is central to the book and we are kept wondering until the very end whether it is a relationship with any hope of survival.
Like many of McEwan's novels, it is difficult to review Sweet Tooth properly without giving too much away. Only at the end is one rewarded with the signature McEwan playfulness, and the twist in this novel changes the reader's outlook on the whole book. It is a testament to his skill as a writer that the giveaway in the first paragraph does not in fact tell us much about the ending:
"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."
In some ways this is actually a very quiet book. Nothing much happens, except that Selena drifts, with an unsatisfying lack of agency, in and out of a number of flawed and sexually questionable relationships, including the one at the start of the book which gives her the entry intro MI5. A few times I thought we were being set up for a twist that would take us in the direction of a more traditional spy novel - for example when Serena, on a 'mission' involving the thorough cleaning of a safe house, finds a small piece of paper upon which are written the initials of her ex-lover (now dead) and the obscure island where he died. But none of this leads to any excitement or intrigue; in fact, the opposite is true. The explanation ends up being so banal that I suspect McEwan was setting us up deliberately in order to thwart our expectations. Indeed, espionage in the '70s is portrayed overall as a rather dull endeavour. I think providing a realistic description of what is essentially a bureaucratic department might have been one of McEwan's objectives in writing the book. He has previously written another spy novel, The Innocent, and whilst that also does not unfold as one would expect - it's McEwan, of course it doesn't - it does contain the anticipated hit of violence. Whereas this book, really, is not a spy novel at all; it is a novel about the power of writing and the motivations for reading, and the intersections between truth and fiction. For example, Tom Haley's short stories are summarised in some detail throughout the book and both we and Serena get to know Tom largely through his fiction. This idea of a writer whose life and character are inextricably intertwined with his writing in a way that makes it impossible to distinguish between the writing and the writer, is central to the novel.
Of course, the interest of any voracious reader will be immediately piqued by a protagonist whose love of books defines her, and a plot in which one of the consistent ideas explored is that of an ideological war fought on the cultural front. I was fascinated by the descriptions of cultural warfare, as well as by the many passages on reading and writing, and what it means to be a writer. My interest in these subjects is what kept me reading.
However, without wanting to reveal the ending, I was left with mixed feelings after finishing the book. I felt that McEwan had been playing with us all along, and moreover, that he had been playing with us in a way that he had explicitly promised not to. I think he had a lot of fun with this one, which is perhaps why Anderson can accurately describe it as 'cheerful'. But I don't know whether to feel betrayed or inspired by his cleverness at the expense of us, his dear readers.
Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5. He is a brilliant writer, but this didn't quite achieve the heights of earlier books such as Atonement or Enduring Love.
Pros / Favourite passages: There are so many noteworthy passages here, about reading and writing. A few for your enjoyment:
Serena describing herself as a reader: "My needs were simple. 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, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn't mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say 'Marry me' by the end. Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. Conrad was beyond my consideration, as were most stories by Kipling and Hemingway. Nor was I impressed by reputations. I read anytihng I saw lying around. Pulp fiction, great literature and everything in between - I gave them all the same rough treatment." And then later: "I caused amusement among my Newnham friends studying English when I told them that Valley of the Dolls was as good as anything Jane Austen ever wrote."
Serena on what it is to be a writer: "As I lay in the dak, waiting for sleep, I thought I was beginning to grasp something about invention. As a reader, a speed-reader, I took it for granted, it was a process I never troubled myself with. You pulled a book from the shelf and there was an invented, peopled world, as obvious as the one you lived in. But now... I thought I had the measure of the artifice, or I almost had it. Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat trasforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of the parts." She then goes through the various elements of Tom's real life that make their way into his writing, followed by: "At one level it was obvious enough how these separate parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into something cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious."
An excerpt from one of Tom's stories: "There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. 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 as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust."
Cons: I have read some reviews of this book in which McEwan is praised for writing so effectively from the perspective of a female protagonist. I was surprised to read these reviews because there are places in this book where the female voice really failed. For example, early on, when Serena is wondering whether a man in whom she has a romantic interest might be gay, as one of her ex-boyfriends turned out to be, she is described as being so interested in nevertheless pursuing a physical relationship with him that she believes she could be happy if he simply took care of her needs, even if it was impossible for her to do the same for him. I believe this is a very masculine point of view. I don't know of many women who seek out their own pleasure so selfishly that it would not trouble them if they were unable to satisfy the man they loved. Surely her pride would be hurt! More than that, surely her self-esteem would be severely shaken by the knowledge that the man she loved could not love her back in the same way. McEwan's very straight, rational writing does not consistently or adequately convey the emotional inner-world of a woman who engages in several romantic relationships throughout the course of the book, and yet these romances are central to the plot. However, without giving too much away, I can say that these criticisms are essentially met and answered in the last chapter of the novel. I'm not sure whether this excuses him entirely, but it does give McEwan a way out of having to worry too profoundly about his weaknesses in characterising a complex woman.
Book club pick: This was the first book picked for my new book club. It was a fun way to start my literary relationship with these woman. I was the most positive of all of us about the book - possibly because I write as well as read, which means that McEwan's musings on the subject probably interested me on a deeper level. The others did not like it, but it provoked much interesting conversation, and for that reason I would recommend it as a book club read.
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