Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is fantastic . The man is Nobel Prize material. The thing I especially enjoyed in this particular book of his is that it reminds me of John LeCarre. It has a little bit of the Cold War tale of intrigue about it, and it is set in the early 1970’s to add to that impression McEwan is a master at telling tales of double dealing, deception, and ultimately disappointment, and this one is no exception.

His protagonist is Serena Frome, who is described as a strikingly gorgeous 23-year-old Cambridge math student who is recruited to join MI5. Serena is a woman who likes sex—quite a lot of it. Her appetite for it drives the drama in this book. She embarks on an affair with a Cambridge professor who is has her reading the classics and teaching her why they are indeed so highly regarded.

She gets an education in the classroom, but the one in the bedroom is the one that propels her into a job. Not long after the professor dumps her, literally by the side of the road, she lands herself a job working as a glorified secretary for England's famous spy agency. Serena is no super spy but a woman of above average intelligence and apparently little interest in climbing the spy ladder.

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 politics of British spy bureaucracy. From this 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.

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, reviewers have noted) named Tom Haley. Before long, they're in love and Haley — released from the grind of his university job — has produced an unfortunately dark, dystopian novella. Almost overnight, he's winning literary prizes and drinking whiskey with Martin Amis (wink wink).

Will Serena's cover be blown? Can their relationship survive her subterfuge? And how will Serena's superiors feel about funding Tom's decidedly anti-capitalist fiction? Well, that is the unraveling that happens at the end of a deftly told tale that is equal to McEwan’s other novels.