MI5 wants to secretly fund fledgling writers and artists whose work it deems anti-communist in sympathy. She diligently files and smiles until the day that her expertise as a novel reader is called upon for a mission dubbed 'Sweet Tooth.' After graduation, Serena moves into a damp bed-sit in London and enters the intelligence service at a time when the glass ceiling for women was ankle-high. Certainly, as much as it is a suspense tale, a novel of ideas and a political meditation on the decline of Britain in the 1970s, Sweet Tooth is also a cynical novel about the art of fiction and its pointlessness in the larger scheme of things.Īs the story goes, beautiful Serena is recruited into MI5 by her lover at Cambridge, a history professor who is one of the many brilliant, narcissistic and essentially mean men whom she falls for. McEwan's title, Sweet Tooth, refers to both a clandestine operation Serena carries out and to the mind-candy lure of fiction itself. Then, by novel's end, McEwan ridicules us readers for ever believing in Serena and the fictional world he's blown breath into. McEwan deploys his great gifts of storytelling to draw readers into an intricate plot about Serena's career during the 1970s, working as a low-level operative for MI5, the British internal intelligence service. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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