Review: Sweet Tooth

What determines the shape and fate of societies? It’s ideas and stories, and their ability to persuade us that in order to stay true to our beliefs, we must take action to upend or to preserve the social and political structures that surround us. That, at least, was the motivation of Cold War operatives on both sides who sought to win the war of ideas in the 20th century. In her book “Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War”, Frances Stonor Saunders documented the workings of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to support anti-communist intellectuals.

In Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan takes this grand battle for hearts and minds to a human scale, by inventing the eponymous and decidedly less ambitious program by the United Kingdom’s internal counter-intelligence agency, MI5, to bankroll writers of both fiction and non-fiction. Amidst the domestic and international turmoil of Great Britain in the early 1970s, the protagonist and narrator, Serena Frume, finds herself entangled in more ways than one.

When Serena, a low-ranking desk worker at MI5, is asked to bring a young writer named T. H. Haley into the program, she relishes the opportunity to psychoanalyze Haley through his short stories. We get excerpts and summaries of those stories, enough to leave us hungry for more, but the story progresses quickly as Serena and her subject predictably fall in love. Just as we fear that this little world will unravel completely, McEwan sheds a whole new light on “Sweet Tooth”, and brings the story to fulminant closure.

This is not a conventional spy novel, and it lacks the scale and ambition of McEwan’s “The Innocent”, the sheer emotional force of “Atonement”, or the darkly cynical satire of “Solar”. But it tells a compelling story about freedom, integrity, trust and corruption, drawing inspiration from the sordid historical realities of the Cold War. It feels in some ways like a reflection on McEwan’s own life and times. The degree to which this becomes apparent gives the novel a light touch of narcissism, which is just sufficiently tempered by irony to not become a serious flaw. “Sweet Tooth” is perhaps not “utterly brilliant” (as Serena Frume characterizes Haley’s stories, perhaps to win him over), but it’s a challenging, enjoyable story worthy of McEwan’s caliber.