The main part of the story is about Tom Haley’s life as a young writer which Ian McEwan admitted is based on the early years of his own career during the 1970s. However, the ending is very satisfying and I enjoyed the build-up to it.
In fact, t he plot unravels quite slowly throughout with the early chapters covering Serena’s early life and studies at Cambridge and the story doesn’t really get going until about half way through. Instead, it is about the kind of deception usually found in personal relationships which is what the story focuses on rather than the politics of the Cold War. Labelled by many as a spy novel, I had expected ‘Sweet Tooth’ to be more about the world of espionage than it actually is.
However, her romantic relationship with one of the young writers involved in the project, Tom Haley, starts to complicate things. She is assigned to an operation named Sweet Tooth in which a cultural foundation is set up to offer financial assistance to writers who speak out against communism. Critical reception was mixed some reviewers found the novel moving and poignant, while others saw it as weaker than much of McEwan's previous work.‘Sweet Tooth’ by Ian McEwan tells the story of a young woman called Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) who is recruited by MI5 after she finishes studying at Cambridge University in the early 1970s. He is not referred to directly in the book, but he did play a part as the host of a real-life literary event fictionalised in the book, involving McEwan and Martin Amis, who does appear in the story. The novel is dedicated to McEwan's late friend Christopher Hitchens. The story explores the relationship between artistic integrity and government propaganda, and addresses competing approaches to literature the boundary between reality and fiction is tested throughout. When she becomes romantically involved with her mark, complications ensue.McEwan wanted to write a novel dealing with the social turmoil of the 1970s, and Sweet Tooth is to a large extent based on his own life. After graduating from Cambridge she is recruited by MI5, and becomes involved in a covert program to combat communism by infiltrating the intellectual world. It deals with the experiences of its protagonist, Serena Frome, during the early 1970s.
Sweet Tooth is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 21 August 2012.
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