Serena being Serena, she immediately jumps into bed with her recruit, a promising young essayist and University of Sussex professor (bearing no small resemblance to McEwan himself) named Tom Haley.

The first half of the book, Serena mostly meanders the gray, dour halls of MI5, engaging in affairs with unappealing men, attending lectures about the dangers of communism, and debating the internecine politics of British spy bureaucracy.įrom this murk, a story finally emerges: Serena’s superiors, noting her love for literature of all stripes, put her in charge of her first mission: She is to secretly recruit and fund a novelist, as part of a propaganda campaign called “Sweet Tooth.” The agenda: Stoke the careers of writers who already tend to write stridently pro-capitalist works - nothing about “the decline of the West, or down with progress or any other modish pessimism” - and win the disenchanted British public’s hearts and minds. “Finds herself” being the operative term - Serena is no super spy but a woman of average intelligence (a third in maths enthusiasm for “The Valley of The Dolls”) and apparently little agency. Their affair is didactic and abortive, and not long after he dumps her by the side of the road she finds herself working as a glorified secretary for England’s famous spy agency. Quite the girl about campus, Serena rarely meets a man she doesn’t want to sleep with - no matter how unattractive, aged or gay - and Professor Canning is no exception.

His protagonist is Serena Frome, a “really quite gorgeous” 23-year-old Cambridge math student who is recruited to join MI5 via an older history professor from the “great and good” mold. It is, after all, a ‘70s-era British spy novel in the mode of John le Carré, a cigarette-hazed world of secret backrooms and Cold War intrigue.

The subject of “Sweet Tooth,” McEwan’s latest novel, would seem at first to be the perfect vehicle for this kind of storytelling. Ian McEwan’s storytelling at its best is a slow burn with a deliciously unexpected grand conflagration - taking the quiet life of a somewhat-flawed protagonist and throwing it into violent disarray with a few bad decisions and sadistic twists.

Ian mcewan spy novel