The spy who loved fiction

SWEET TOOTH

By Ian McEwan

376 pages

Available at Fully Booked

What if a branch of the British Secret Service were devoted to literature? And what if winning the Cold War meant winning the hearts and minds of readers through fiction, not propaganda?

That’s the intriguing premise of Ian McEwan’s new novel Sweet Tooth, which has some basis in Cold War fact: writers like George Orwell and Anthony Burgess were recruited by the British government in the ‘50s, in part because of their critiques of the Soviet Empire, which was then the darling of the left-wing West. 

Sweet Tooth follows Serena Frome, an attractive, lit-reading daughter of a bishop who is recruited to MI6 to help cultivate anti-communist writers in the early hippie ‘70s.

The young, attractive Serena is put in charge of signing up writers under Operation Sweet Tooth, a scheme to win the Cold War through pro-democracy fiction.

Sounds a little daffy, but McEwan invests us in the story, presenting lengthy background on Serena — her name conjures up ‘60s spy heroines like Modesty Blaise, but she’s really just a mathematics major, and a smart, unambitious reader of trite paperbacks in her free time. Yet that very predilection makes MI5 choose her as the perfect literary mole. She quickly burrows into the work of budding fictionist T.H. Haley, and finds her attraction goes far beyond the pages.

This is where McEwan’s story takes off. After 100 pages of background, Serena grows closer to her writer — and the writing process — by presenting a few of his stories for our perusal. This “story within a story” concept is nothing new, but it’s fun to read tidbits of ideas that McEwan has possibly been storing away like chestnuts (it’s been a while since his last short story collection, In Between the Sheets). The author of Atonement shifts away from the navel-gazing of On Chesil Beach and Saturday to present a romantic spy thriller of sorts, though it’s mostly about the secrets between lovers and writers.

Tom Haley is a professor who’s written a few articles for magazines denouncing the Berlin Wall and other communist excesses. Frome is recruited to sign him on to accept “funding” from the Freedom Foundation. Of course, he’s never to be told where the money actually comes from. He’s ostensibly free to write what he likes — preferably a novel that will trumpet pro-democratic ideology. But Serena falls for the writer, and soon finds it’s not easy to control the flow of fiction. As her boss, Nutting, tells her: “You know as well as I do, it’s not straightforward to deduce an author’s views from his novels.”

The tricky gulf between creation and meaning is part of the appeal of Sweet Tooth. McEwan’s novels are often concerned with what goes on between the lines (and sometimes, as his story collection is titled, “in between the sheets”). Whether it’s the truth lurking behind the multiple narratives of Atonement, or the meaning hidden in tiny gestures in On Chesil Beach, subtext is what McEwan’s novels are often built upon.

And in an age of Wikileaks, when truth seems to be a few clicks away, McEwan takes us back to a time of history when it was necessary to read between the lines: the Cold War, when MI5 was fighting political battles that spread to intellectual ones.

But it would be merely an intellectual exercise if McEwan weren’t so good at inhabiting his characters and putting them in peril. This time he inhabits young Serena, and though her petulance at times takes us back to the pre-liberated ‘60s (like Mad Men or the BBC series The Hour, McEwan setting his story in the recent past lends it a kind of retroactive irony), she’s expertly drawn and always compelling.

And she’s kinky as well. She knows just how to get her writer/lover’s pistons going:

In certain moods it aroused him, the daydream of being a cuckold… Sometimes when we made love, he would prompt me with whispers and I would oblige by telling him about the man I was seeing and what I did for him. Tom preferred him to be a writer, and the less probable, the more status-laden, the greater his exquisite agony. Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, pipe-smoking Gunter Grass — I went with the best.

Then — just when you think you’ve got it figured out — McEwan raises the postmodern stakes. Like Atonement, Sweet Tooth adds an extra layer. By the end, what could have been a standard spy thriller with touches of romance turns into a metafictional examination of various ways of lying. While Serena belongs to a spy organization, it can also be said that writers are all spies as well. And this interplay between surveillance and concealment adds an extra level of pleasure to Sweet Tooth (though the pleasure is delayed till the very end).

As a metafictional look at how story and fiction-writing works, Sweet Tooth works on several levels beyond its perfectly functional spy romance roots. It’s probably McEwan’s most fully inhabited novel in years.