Book Review: Sweet Tooth

A number of Christmas presents joined my always large pile of “books waiting to be read”.

Sweet Tooth managed to jump the queue. (This may just possibly have been because the reviewer confused McEwan (the author and author of Atonement) with Pat Barker (the author of the Regeneration Trilogy). Sweet Tooth was read in the hopefully quiet, but always impossibly social, patch between Boxing Day and the journey to the beach in early January.

Serena Frome (pronounced “Froom”) is a daughter of an Anglican bishop. She attends Cambridge and, at her mother’s urging, studies maths when her chief love is voraciously consuming novels. Her talent in math has been overrated and, in 1972, she graduates with a third not a first class degree.

(Serena appears to be the same age as the author, McEwan. It appears that her narration of the experience of the times of her youth is similar to an autobiographical recall of those halcyon times by the novel’s author.)

Despite this comparative failure (third class), helped by an affair with a middle aged, married tutor, Serena manages to be selected as a graduate entrant to MI5.

She is assigned to recruit, as part of a disguised, supported funding program for writers, an accomplished short story writer, polemicist and potential novelist, Tom Haley. The program is a secret (including secret from the subsidised writers) way of assisting selected anti-communist writers by freeing them to follow their writing dreams by providing comfortable stipends of untied money.

Serena’s life is complicated by her past and emerging romantic connections and, as she confides, on the first page of the novel, she is disgraced and sacked from the service.

Ian McEwan is the author of Atonement. Sweet Tooth continues McEwan’s passion for layering of levels of writing with books and stories revealed within the book. Tom’s brilliant short stories are summarised in the novel through Serena’s narration and they affect the action as her view of the man is affected by her understanding of his obsessions as revealed in his writing.

The book is fast paced and attractively easy to read. This is almost dangerous as the reader is seduced into skipping over important clues as to the later revealed significance of certain sign posted facts.

In an amazing closing chapter, a new layering is revealed and a series of unexpected complications are revealed. While the device is different, the making the unsuspected but obvious clear is stylishly similar to the denouement of detective novels. The device and the style resembles the elderly detective getting everyone into the drawing room to reveal to the murderer and everyone else exactly how the murder occurred and how it was fiendishly concealed.

Sweet Tooth is a clever tale delightfully chronicling a special kind of London of the early 1970s.

Stephen Keim

Clayfield

4 January 2013

Footnotes

1. An imprint of Random House