Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Book cover photo: National Post

Recently I've been reading a lot about Bletchley Park, and earlier this year I visited it.  Somehow I didn't imagine that in 1972 Britain the recruiting would still be going on, with young recruits signing the Official Secrets Act, promising to reveal nothing about their work in the shadow world of spying.

The induction of a young woman into MI5 is how master novelist Ian McEwan begins his story. When she begins her work for the security service, Serena is twenty-one, green and hurting from an affair with the middle-aged Tony Canning, a married Cambridge professor.

The affair with Tony takes place in a cottage near Bury St. Edmonds, close to where the novelist Angus Wilson lived -- he served in Bletchley Park and later taught at the University of East Anglia, where Ian McEwan took his Master's degree. I couldn't help wondering whether the cottage where Tony Canning conducts his affair with the lovely Serena might be based on the cottage where Wilson lived, and where he and his partner Tony Garrett were visited by many of Wilson's students as well as fellow literary luminati.

After her initial stint as a low-level secretary (at the time, females did the dog work and couldn't be agents), the task taken on by this Cambridge-educated mathematics graduate proves highly unusual. Turns out it's her voracious reading habit and knowledge of books that MI5 is after. The Cold War continues, and plans are afoot to win the ideo-cultural struggle by alleviating the notoriously uncertain financial lives of certain secretly chosen writers, so they can produce work that is a credit to our side in the propaganda war. 

The big story questions all centre on young Serena's love life. Counting the man she doesn't realize is a homosexual, this gorgeous young blonde races through four paramours. As the plot moves forward, readers wonder. Why would Tony Canning stage a breakup over a domestic detail, thus ending a satisfying secret affair with a beautiful woman many years his junior? As for colleague Max Greatorex: when Serena gets over her crush and moves him along, would he lose his MI5-style cool, and do something foolish, vengeful or worse?

Up-and-coming author Tom Haley, beyond the most basic due diligence, does not ask questions about why he should be chosen. Serena relies on the old idea of ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies. After all, what novelist would ask questions when some obscure artistic organization seeks him out to hand over a fat cheque every month for the next three years so he can live the dream of focusing on his art?

This book has a comic flavour; there are elements of the ridiculous throughout, interspersed with deftly handled literary criticism and allusions to various elements of history that are all too dark and all too real. I loved Max Greatorex's speech to "his" author in which he explains that "any institution, any organization eventually becomes a dominion, self-contained, competitive, driven by its own logic and bent on survival and on extending its territory."

A favourite remembered image is the one of Angus Wilson, one moment urbane in his white suit and lavender bow tie, then turning puce in the face and threatening to rough up an agent who tries to interfere with the work of the arts organization he heads. McEwan must have had fun with that scene. One almost sees the 'camp' Wilson; with his penchant for sharp comedy, he was probably laughing from the other side, even as McEwan typed.

Another rich but understated comic vein: Serena is the obedient daughter of a bishop and she has majored in Maths at Cambridge, rather than her beloved subject, English literature. After signing the Official Secrets Act, she falls into an affair with someone in whose life her employer is secretly dabbling. Either she expects to get away with it, or she's just too immature and naive to face up to the danger for both of them.

A colleague leaves the security service to sell beds, and Tom Haley is the bright young author chosen to receive the stipend. He is meant to make communism look bad, but fails to produce what MI5 secretly hopes for but only vaguely requests.

The story is set during the early seventies against the background of Irish terrorists, the crippling miners' strike and the energy crisis. Tom gets a publisher before he's quite ready to go to press, and ends up handing in a lightweight and incompletely edited dystopia about the fall of the energy-glugging west, for which he nonetheless receives the prestigious Austen prize.

The author of many respected books including the recent Solar, McEwan is a brilliant plotter, and of course there are surprises to the very end. The novel is a good read and a satisfying send-up of government secrecy and MI5's real and bizarre relationship to fiction writing. Truth may be almost as strange as fiction in the case of this book, but even a dedicated researcher can't be absolutely sure -- so much of the information required for a rational assessment is still classified.