Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan is a subtle, moving book about espionage. There is a touch of oxymoron about that, somewhere. No-one is killed. There are no guns. No-one is shot, poisoned, dismembered or tortured, at least not physically, within these pages. There’s plenty of anguish, however, but this is usually personal and more often than not self-inflicted. Sweet Tooth demonstrates that drama, excitement and suspense can be generated by a plot that puts people and their relationships at the fore. After all, intelligence is born of people’s thoughts, and is rarely generated by bullets or car chases.

Sirena Frome (rhymes with plume) has been brought up with her sister by a Church of England Bishop as father, married to a rather frumpish wife. The background is dismissed quickly, but returns occasionally. Ian McEwan via Sirena tells us that it’s not important. What is significant is Sirena’s love of reading and associated ability to absorb texts at speed and, alongside that, her seemingly innate facility for mathematics. She just can’t see the problems that others refuse. She ought to have studied English, but pragmatism choses the mathematics option and Cambridge embraces her, though not happily. She is no ordinary mathematician, as her university is soon to find out.

It must also be noted that Sirena Frome (rhymes with plume) was also a child of the sixties and has developed a liberal approach to and a distinct taste for sex. She is blonde, young and desirable, certainly not dumb. Wherever she goes, it seems not to take long before sensuality bubbles to a boiling surface.

And thus Sirena leads her author, Ian McEwan, into several relationships of varying frequency, quality and intensity. There’s a bloke who realises, through her, that he prefers other blokes. There’s an affair with an older man, a Cambridge tutor with a complex marriage and, as it turns out, other complexities as well. There is a colleague in her first job, facilitated by her complex older man, who gets nowhere with Sirena and leaves for pastures elsewhere. And there is Tom Hanley, a writer who develops a style that really hits the spot.

Sirena’s relatively brief fling with the older Cambridge tutor leads to a recommendation that she should apply for a job with the Civil Service. And this is not to be any old filing clerk position, but something with one of those secret outfits, MI5, no less. The talk and gossip about the office and the papers concentrates on some weighty issues of the day – miners’ strike, three-day weeks, Provisional IRA activities in Northern Ireland. As a woman, Sirena Frome believes she is probably at a disadvantage when the tasks are given out, with the big boys allowed to cherry-pick. They just don’t take women seriously, it seems, and the jobs they get are jokes.

And Sirena does get a job – cleaning. It leads elsewhere and soon she finds herself at the forefront of intelligence work, reading. Questions arise by chance and, of course, in a world where no-one trusts anyone, there are never any answers, only suggested half-truths. Some of the pieces, however, start to fit, and the picture becomes familiar. A colleague tries it on, but it doesn’t work out. He retreats, but skeletons are left in cupboards where we thought there was no furniture.

Sirena’s reading is focussed, its aim to decipher, perhaps lead opinion. In the end, isn’t intelligence about just that, what we think, what we assume? And who decides that? How is it that one career flourishes, leads to stardom and award, while others, apparently equally talented, wither and die, or at worst, stumble along in anonymity? Is this an area where intelligence services can usefully contribute? Is this a sensible question, given what we already know? And just which writers and works have benefitted in the past from virtual state sponsorship? Some will be revealed, suggested, at least.

This is where Tom Hanley appears. Academic, unlikely and unknown, he has produced some interesting work. It’s not especially noteworthy, we might fell, but there is potential. Exactly where might that potential lead? And who might take up the cause to offer support, guidance, influence? And precisely what role might Sirena play?

And it is here that Sweet Tooth displays its remarkable subtlety. It examines the concepts of fame, appreciation, critical acclaim and success, and even the nature of creativity, itself, in surprising ways, never via the head-on anguish we have come to expect. When writers write, who is it that is in control of the process? If art is the imitation of life, what forces shape the reality we experience? When we say we believe something, or adopt an opinion, just how much of it is generated on our behalf so that we might adopt it as a package? And can values be promoted? Of course they can, but by whom, and for what reasons? And who picks up the pieces should the whole thing backfire?

Sweet Tooth continues its way, relating a plot that involves treachery, deceit, double-dealing and a shifting of alliances that might constitute betrayal. At the heart of everything is sex, personal relationships and self-interest, however. The story lives through a passionate relationship between the clandestine Sirena and her writer. Though she desires permanence, Sirena can never reveal exactly who she is to her lover. Can he be open with her?

The novel thus presents a story related from a distant future, a reminiscence of what might have been. Throughout, Ian McEwan’s prose is nothing less than a joy, delicately transparent and arrestingly vivid at the same time. But, by the end, we are not even sure whose book has been written, or even who the real writer might have been. Until, that is, we immediately start it all over again. And then…

The Book Of Evidence by John Banville

Freddie Montgomery, the central character of John Banville’s The Book Of Evidence, is an apparently complex man. The word ‘apparently’ is important because he has a tendency to cloak really quite simple actions in complex, sometimes convoluted narrative.

The Book Of Evidence has a strong plot, but one that is revealed only piecemeal in the form of what seem at first sight to be the random recollections of an imprisoned man. A potential reader would not want a listing of these details here, since the manner of their revelation is one of the most absorbing aspects of this beautifully crafted book.

As Freddie reveals his story, just a little at a time, we learn his motives and discover precisely what he has done to warrant his incarceration and trial. This jigsaw of history eventually fits together to reveal a series of events and relationships that were perhaps always confused. That’s life. Suffice it to say that there is a family history, an art collection, the theft of a painting and a murder, nothing less than the smashing of a woman’s head with a hammer. Piece that together with a gay bar, snippets of Ireland, police and prison and there is the basic framework of John Banville’s novel. 

t is the author’s use of language, however, that creates most of this book’s effect. Though never aspiring to difficulty for its own sake, the style is often complex, often employs convoluted sentences that meander their way to places their openings seem unable even to conceive. Their colour and effect make The Book Of Evidence a delight to read from beginning to end. But some time before the end, their effect may also be likened to the surface of a busy canvas whose almost fanatical attention to detail eventually drags attention away from the overall design. For some, the style might begin to grate.

Thus, by the end of the book, I felt that the stylistic invention had begun to dominate, to confuse, even obfuscate. There were powerful points to make about the character of Freddie, but the parts that adhered – sometimes randomly – to his outline rather confused the impression he made. There again, that might just have been the point, since he also eventually managed to convey a peculiarly individual, a strangely distant and detached relationship with his own actions and motives. In the end, we know just as much about Freddie as he wanted us to know.

View this book on amazon The Book of Evidence

Restless by William Boyd - A review by Philip Spires

In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-provoking and all this set within a continuum of contemporary or historical events which themselves become re-interpreted by the fiction. 

In Restless, Boyd’s latest novel, he has re-stated this ability and, if anything, written it larger via a smaller form. The historical element in Restless is supplied by the activities of an offshoot of World War Two intelligence. Ostensibly a private, dis-ownable initiative of a particular group, Boyd suggests that it formed an integral part of the British strategy, during the early part of the war, to force the United States to join the Allied effort. The fact, therefore, that it was undermined and subverted so that it perhaps aimed to achieve the opposite of its brief was probably par for the course when espionage meets its freelance counter, but the denouement is surprising and wholly credible. 

 In front of this backdrop of fact meeting fiction, we have a landscape of human relationships. Ruth is a single mother in Oxford. She, herself, has had certain German connections, nay relations, hence the motherhood. She makes a living teaching English to foreign tutees, has several dubious visitors, dreams about completing an aging PhD and generally spends much of her time looking after a precocious five-year-old. And then her mother becomes someone quite unknown to her. The widow in the Oxfordshire retreat suddenly becomes part Russian, part English, with a French step-mother. She possessed several different identities before she became Mrs Gilmartin and most of these were fiction to provide cover for the others. How many of us, after all, can claim to have known our parents before they were parents?

So, as Mrs Gilmartin the mother reveals to her daughter via instalments of an autobiography that she is really Eva Delectorskaya, recruited in Paris to conduct a campaign of wartime disinformation in the United States, the complications of life gradually attain the status of the mundane. Recruited, perhaps, because she was rootless and thus expendable, Eva proved herself intellectually and operationally superior to her manipulative managers and survived the posting that was supposed to achieve their subverted ends and, at the same time, erase her potential to supply evidence. 

Many years later, Eva, now Mrs Gilmartin, feels the need to get even, to expose the double or triple-cross for what it was and deliver at least a prod to the comfortable, self-congratulatory but traitorous British establishment that ran her. Daughter Ruth becomes the means. So one messy life tries to tie up its soggy ends via the actions of another who is apparently yet to attain the same depths of complication. And she succeeds. The fright is delivered. The memory that Eva, the mother, was fundamentally brighter than the upper class Brits who were trying to manipulate her is rekindled. Her training was perfect, but she went beyond it and the plan backfired, irrelevantly as it turned out because greater events intervened. 

But years later, Eva, Mrs Gilmartin, is still brighter than her boss and, through her daughter’s efforts, she brings a special kind of justice to bear on the double-dealer who ruined, but also perhaps made her life. In characteristically humble terms, William Boyd reminds us at the end that we are all watched, all awaiting the cupboard to reveal its skeleton, but in our more mundane lives, it is unlikely to be as colourful an event as that which Eva Delectorskaya, Mrs Gilmartin, and her daughter Ruth uncover. View this book on amazon Restless