It’s a good thing art is
not what you watch in a cinema with a huge bowl of popcorn on one side and a
plastic cup of Coke on the other. Because if that was the case, I would swiftly
dismiss Sweet Tooth as the dullest,
weakest novel of McEwan and be done with it. And maybe that is exactly what I
would have done were I to write this review while still reading the novel or a
week after finishing it. Good art, however, is different. It hijacks your
attention and your time. And, most importantly, it has that insidious staying
power that keeps working its way into your brain soon afterwards.
Having said that, Sweet Tooth is not a great novel. It is topical, it is clever, it is well-written.
The problem is – it rarely goes beyond that.
In fact, I would still
stick to my initial point that McEwan’s new novel is a merely good book written
by a great writer. You only need to read one page of Sweet Tooth, aloud or otherwise, to feel that simple yet masterful
pulse of a perfect English sentence. And, as it always goes with McEwan, you
will hear your brain purring in satisfaction when, for instance, having a new
sex partner is compared to learning a new card game. So no, it is not about the
writing (McEwan’s style is still that recognizable and highly effective
combination of ‘no-nonsense’ and ‘subtle’); it’s the substance I’m after.
Serena Frome is the one
telling the story. From her family background to her taste in literature to her
academic achievements, the girl is so
ordinary it’s exasperating. And yet she does have an Anglican bishop for a
father. She does read an absolute monstrous amount of books. She does show some
modest talent for maths. All of which adds up to an irrevocably one-dimensional
character who, nonetheless, gets to work as the lowest of the low in MI5 thanks
to a rather unlikely love affair with an elderly Cambridge professor. British
Security Service is a cold and alien organization that is supposed to swallow
Serena up with all the paperwork and icy, high-brow indifference. Unlike her
only female friend, Shirley, she simply doesn’t have enough healthy cynicism or sense
of humour to fight off any of that. Something changes, however, when Serena is
included into a secret project codenamed Sweet
Tooth, which is where Serena’s good looks and love for literature really
come into play.
A spy novel then.
Interestingly, Sweet Tooth does for
the genre pretty much what Martin Amis’ (who actually appears in this novel) Night Train did for the detective story
genre: it skims it and plays with it and then condenses it into a smart little
thing that ends up being neither here nor there. The characters are so flimsy
and uninteresting they barely exist (women in particular) – so much so that
when you feel McEwan is making a comment on feminism, it comes off feeble and
quickly gets sucked back into sand. Serena Frome, for her part, is a very
unlikable main character. I could of course spend a few tedious hours
justifying why she had to be so bland
and mundane, but can that really justify the rather bland and mundane plot that
wants to get by on the premise that there is a twist at the end (because
otherwise this would be a real
downer), one that is supposed to put things right? I don’t have to mention any
of the genre’s biggest names here (“we live in the shadows of giants”,
according to McEwan’s own words), but for a spy novel this is unforgivably dry.
And even when the twist finally arrives (and it’s an arrival, not a
spine-tingling snap), my excitement quickly vanishes under the heavy, plodding
weight of 300 pages that proceeded it. I feel shortchanged.
To be completely fair,
McEwan hasn’t properly intrigued me since the hugely underrated Saturday, and the odd retelling of his
own old short stories throughout Sweet
Tooth only proves that there’s now some kind of void where new plots have
to be. This novel, remember, is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, and while
that can only be viewed as a great gesture, Sweet
Tooth just lacks the exhilarating drive of that late, great man. Because
style or not, take away the name, and what you are left with is a moderately
successful novel that (with some luck) could be made it into a modestly
successful film.
Regardless of all my
criticism, though, the novel did leave a good taste in my mouth. Sour taste,
not sweet, but that I guess makes sense. McEwan’s great status is not in doubt,
and he manages to end it all beautifully and make every word you’ve read
painfully meaningful: in this post-Snowden world, how small is a man? And how
small can a man really be? It’s one of those books: you don’t get too much pleasure
while reading it, but after time its tentacles are felt well deep inside. It’s that
staying power. God knows, maybe it is all about that brief final sentence, full
of desperate and anguished hope: “Dearest Serena, it’s up to you”. This is it,
I guess, that spine-tingling snap you’ve missed earlier.
7/10
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