Sweet Tooth, by Booker prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan, is a Cold War spy story with a difference. There are no fights, gunplay, car chases, interrogations, or any of the normal cloak and dagger activity you would associate with a 1970s plot involving MI5 or similar security agencies. It’s an espionage thriller with a unique literary twist and for a change, the ‘hero’, or antihero really, is a woman.

The book is set in England in the early to mid-70s – a bleak period of strikes and one of the many periods in recent British history when the country was felt to be ‘going to the dogs’ and that the fabric of democracy was threatened.

While at Cambridge University, the main protagonist, Serena Frome, becomes romantically involved with Tony Canning, a professor who is not what he seems. Before ending the affair he gets Serena a job, rather implausibly, with MI5.

The novel focuses on a mundane but interesting aspect of espionage: The not too well known propensity for security agencies such as the CIA and MI5 to become involved in secretly promoting literary or cultural activities sympathetic to ‘The Cause’ – anti-communism in this case. This, according to McEwan’s book, can involve writers seen as sympathetic being (often unknowingly) published, paid for and promoted by western governments and their security agencies, in the knowledge that they will produce writings that promote the cause of anti-communism, or presumably anti-Islamic fundamentalism nowadays.

Frome is offered a chance to take part in a new covert programme code named ‘Sweet Tooth’, which offers financial assistance to young writers and journalists with anti-communist leanings. Her unsuspecting ‘stooge’ is young writer Thomas Haley, whose fiction she admires and with whom she quickly falls in love.

Frome offers him a grant from the Freedom International Foundation: a front for MI5’s covert literary activities. The two begin an affair and things soon begin to go pear-shaped. The plot twists in an absorbing, if not unexpected, fashion and gradually, Frome discovers that she has also been exploited by MI5.

Interesting facets of the book include querying what the purpose of all the Cold War cloak and dagger stuff really was, and very clever ‘function within function’ passages describe Haley’s innovative but ultimately pretentious literary works.

- Niall Hunter

Book review - Health & Living - Spy story with a difference