There’s a degree of irony in Su’s second choice of book for this project since it was part of my in-flight reading choices for my first ever trip to Thailand back in 2015. I even had the hotel key from my layover in Guangzhou, China that I’d used as a bookmark six years ago still inside the book.
Although I’ve been a big fan of Ian McEwan’s work for a while now, and list his Amsterdam as one of my favorites, I picked up Sweet Tooth as an after-thought for that trip. I love McEwan’s style and turn of phrase, but most of his books are worth the read just for the unexpected denouements he springs on his readers. Sweet Tooth is no exception to that norm: an expectation of the unexpected.
My initial feelings about his narrative were that it seemed at times a bit self-conscious, that it strained to meet many plausibility tests, and that it was riddled with distracting inconsistencies. I mean the premise of Serena Frome “(rhymes with plume)” (3), a young, good-looking woman in early 1970s England, a Cambridge graduate with a third in mathematics but with a hidden passion for English literature, the daughter of a Protestant bishop from East Anglia being hired by MI5 . . . well I suppose stranger things have happened, but not many.
As with many of my reads, I began at the end of the book and the acknowledgments (I have been known to read entire last chapters first, but I’m glad I didn’t with this one!). The list of acknowledgments made me nervous. McEwan cited about 15 books on spying he’d consulted, I presumed as part of his research for the book. I worried that his fiction would smack of being learned, strained, or, as I stated earlier, a bit self-conscious. As a result, he was dealing with a skeptic right out of the gate.
I started keying in on little glitches as I read such as his protagonist’s reference to a friend’s husband “who once kept goal for the [Nigerian] soccer team” (141). Those awful Americanisms probably weren’t part of the patois of 1970’s England, and I was further perturbed by “soccer” being replaced by the more fitting “football” later in Serena’s narrative. She even had an authentic reference to “rugger” for rugby which rendered the keeping goal in soccer more jarring.
And then there were the detailed descriptions of Serena’s peregrinations around the streets of London. They were replete with specific street names and landmarks, but just seemed to be trying too hard to create an air of authenticity. Those streets came across as tedious arguments of insidious intent, as the poet says.
Finally, there was the clinical reference to Serena’s perineum being stimulated as she made love to Tom Haley (220). It seemed almost bookish or researched, and I heard myself say “perineum?” aloud as I thought of a more natural “p” or “c” word that may not be as PC, but certainly more authentic for the throes of passion.
But for all that, Sweet Tooth drew me in. I should have trusted the path set for me by the author and just be entertained. What actually had me drop my critic’s guard and go with the flow of the narrative were the delicious little excerpts from Tom’s short fiction sprinkled throughout the middle sections of the novel. I found myself conjuring full-blown stories from the vignettes. They were intriguing insights to the creative process and were only revealed for what they truly were during the last chapter. Serena loves them, but they are not to be judged at face value.
The apparent implausibility of the plot, Tom’s stories, and the designed inauthentic narrative subtly lay the groundwork for the crashing last chapter. Sweet Tooth is another must-read McEwan book and an excellent example of meta fiction. Yes, I'm still a McEwan fan.
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