Sweet art of spying

Sweet Tooth, much as the misleading name suggests, is not a spy tale. Certainly not in the suave, guns and gadgets explosive loud action James Bond kind of way, nor the quiet, understated but surefooted spywork of George Smiley, and definitely not the modern-day, almost bizarre thriller setting for the 21st century Spooks of MI5. What we have here is a fresh-out-of-college mathematics graduate, Serena Frome, stumbling, in some ways comically, through the unglamorous, almost boring lacklustre world of British intelligence in the early 1970s. In a Britain trying to overcome economic downturn and combating industrial unrest and Irish dissident terrorism. And what may’ve seemed as an espionage job turns out to be, initially, and for the next few months, typing out memos, much like the female secretary milieu of 1960s Mad Men. The book has a girl’s romantic quest quality to it — it certainly gives that impression when you read of her escapades — but to leave it at that is to seriously underestimate McEwan. Stick with it and it grows on you. By her seemingly first person account, Ms Frome (rhymes with plume) is almost a directionless young girl, who has a great interest in literature, and had it not been for her obliquely feminist mother’s insistence that as a woman it was her duty to study maths at Cambridge (though she sucked at it, if one may venture), may have most likely pursued it in education too. Nevertheless, she’s a voracious reader and devours anything legible. Blonde and extremely gorgeous, we learn of Serena’s string of lovers in college and then another, Jeremy, a nerdish historian and somewhat sexually confused, who eventually introduces her to Tony Canning, his history tutor and the one who enlists her for MI5. Canning, who is an “old MI5 hand”, almost seems to take charge of Serena, instructing her on what to read — brushing up on history and everything political — all with the solitary purpose of grooming her for the intelligence service, to the extent of having her recruitment interview set up. They also have an affair alongside. Serena does make it to MI5, keeping her parents unaware of it who think that she works as a civil servant. After the initial dreary few months and the prospects of a dalliance with a male colleague, Max Greatorex, who, by virtue of inexplicable seniority and also a soft corner, recommends her name, Serena is presented with an espionage job. It is not so much spying a la Mata Hari as an almost innocuous honey-trapping of a writer, T.H. Haley, that the MI5 ostensibly wants to fund to counter Russian Communist propaganda. The mission itself is quite the opposite of the life-at-risk wartime spying that one may hope for in reading such a book. Propaganda funding, though, is not so much fiction, as the British foreign office did fund translations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and as also the CIA funding Encounter magazine. Closer home, there has been the ISI funding Ghulam Nabi Fai’s Kashmiri American Council, spreading anti-India propaganda over Kashmir in the West. That, though, led to criminal conviction. What Serena is enlisted to do may not involve any serious spook job but the book does have its share of a Kim Philby-esque drama and the surrounding paraphernalia of people being followed and their houses searched and bugged. Ms Frome meets Tom Haley, a young academic and writer, and manages to successfully convince him to let the intelligence organisation she represents fund his writing. They also form a deep personal relationship, which seems blissful till it’s threatened by malicious spitefulness. Ian McEwan masterfully guides you through all the events so that one is either totally or thoroughly unprepared when one of his famous twists in the tale occur. He doesn’t disappoint his readers, even though he should be given credit for dropping enough hints, which, when seen in retrospect, should have set off the alarm bells. In fact, McEwan does to his reader exactly what he quotes as something his heroine doesn’t like being done to the audience (“I wanted to feel the ground beneath my feet”). If this is your first McEwan book, don’t approach it in the hope of it being like an Ian Fleming novel, it won’t fulfil your thriller thirst as this is not what this book is or was ever meant to be. For others who have read McEwan before, he will leave you on tenterhooks, but not like your life depended on it. He pleasantly strolls with you through the book, till you encounter what you least expect.