IAN McEWAN. 2012. <em>SWEET TOOTH</em>. TORONTO: ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA, 294.

Abstract

an English novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter, whose ravishingly refined prose style intensifies his own subversive humour and disquieting subject matter, has published more than ten novels. His work falls into two distinct periods: an early one, culminating in the publication of his short story collections First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Beh\>een the Sheets(\91'S), earns McEwan the reputation o f a controversial writer who is obsessed with "the perverse, the grotesque, and the macabre"; his later works display, as David Malcolm puts it, "a more mature engagement with the wider world of history and society," focusing much more on psychological and moral complexities. Although these later novels reveal considerable growth in the range and depth o f his work, they are still laced with a sense of dread and suspense. Also, they deal with a number o f recurring themes using a range o f self-reflexive forms, the relationship between fact and fiction, intertextual references and historical context. Adopting an "overtly political approach," while, at the same time, emphasizing the private psyche o f individuals, McEwan underlines the distinction between subjective and objective realities. He often plays with these differences, prompting readers to reconsider their critical assumptions about literature. It seems that he enjoys playing tricks and his new novel is certainly another one. M cEwan's latest novel Sweet Tooth is a story o f Serena Frome, a "quite gorgeous" Cambridge math student who meets Tony Canning, an older history professor, that secures a position for her with MI5, the domestic counterespionage service. She takes part in a secret operation which recruits and funds anticommunist writers, and thus, embarks on the cultural front o f the Cold War. Being a quick and voracious reader, Serena is given the task o f enticing a young novelist, Tom Haley, into this program. She becomes infatuated with Haley's short stories and then, after meeting him in person, with Haley himself. As the novel progresses, this romantic affair blossoms and evolves into real love, making Serena feel more and more uncomfortable with her subterfuge. How long is she to maintain her cover story? Is she to reveal that she works for MI5? And how are her superiors to react when they discover she has taken her mark as her lover?The novel does not only deal with the social turmoil o f the early 1970s -the strikes, the IRA terrorist attacks and espionage intrigues, the hippie culture and its false optimism -but it also explores the boundary between reality and fiction, the relationship between the storyteller and the reader. This subject matter McEwan has examined in his previous novels, perhaps most obviously in The Innocent (1990) and Atonement (2001). While The Innocent is primarily concerned with the disastrous effects o f history on individual's life, Sweet Tooth, although dealing with the politics o f culture, centers more on the process o f writing and the nature of