"Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan,

 Sweet Tooth. A Novel by Ian McEwan, Alfred A Knopf, Canada, 2012

It didn’t take much to get me excited about reading the latest Ian McEwan.  I saw, firstly, that it was dedicated to one of my favourite people, the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011.  Secondly, McEwan has a way of hooking the reader into his story from the first page.  It is a remarkable gift, this – he seems to do it every time, for me, at any rate.

Then, I like the way he savours his words.  I like the way in which they are packaged and presented. I like the way he uses words like “orotund” – meaning pompous, or pretentious – and gets away with it, without sounding it.  I like the way he can set you the scene by a simple phrase  - “Among the favoured topics in letters to The Times were the miners, ‘a worker’s state’, the bipolar world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, flying pickets, and the Battle for Saltley” – and there you have it!  You are plunged immediately back into the Britain of the 1970’s. 

I love the way he lets the reader see the ways in which his characters think and look.  Of the main character, (a somewhat conservative MI5 Agent called Serena Frome (rhymes with plume), who was recruited by a much older lover – “I went on working in Curzon Street while I tended the little shrine of my secret grief”.  Of a minor character, who becomes hugely significant later on in the novel “It was the case that his ears protruded from strange hillocks of bone at the sides of his skull and those ears were awfully pink”.

She, the narrator, describes one passing character as someone with a “dry gingerish look and the tightly swallowed vowels of a South African, though he originally came from Surrey”.  These are brilliances.  They are polished and they duly shine.  They have a savour and a scent that is just wonderful and ravishing.  And the book is laced with them.

Then there are the casual observances – “Reality isn’t always middle class”.  “We were like tennis players warming up, rooted to our baselines, sending fast but easy balls down the centre of the court to our opponent’s forehand, taking pride in our obliging accuracy”.  Now that is dazzling writing!

The story is, nonetheless, an easy one.  Miss Frome is tasked with signing up a talented young novelist to a foundation – run by MI5 and codenamed “Sweet Tooth”.  A fairly daft idea of the secret service funding novelists, who, it is hoped, will project a particular view of Britain, inside and out.  She falls for the smart young novelist whom she has tethered and has to live with the strange, but delicious deception of not revealing to him who she really is. 

Her background is ordinary.  She is the daughter of an Anglican Bishop.  “It was”, she says, “one of the blessings of our family life, and perhaps Anglicanism in general, that we were never expected to go to church to hear or see our father officiate.  It was of no interest to him whether we were there or not”.

She is mendacious, for sure.  But she isn’t evil or wanton.  She is ordinary – the perfect spy.  The fact that she is “rather gorgeous as well” certainly counts in her favour.  Her task is a relatively small one.  The project is peripheral.  But she derives great pleasure from it.

The book describes the tests and turns of a fairly ordinary, very happy and rather fulfilling relationship.  The sex is good.  The money coming from the Foundation makes life easy.  The couple enjoy good dinners with good wine on a much more regular basis than would normally be the case for people of their age.  They are happy and content.  And then a disaster which was waiting to happen, does.

Now it is at this point that an ordinary, pleasant read gets turned into something quite extraordinary.  There must be very few writers who could manage to play the reader so thoroughly and so comprehensively as does McEwan.  He does it in a single, deft, flip.  In a moment.  In a twinkling of an eye.  And he does it with such dexterity that I guarantee you will be left breathless and laughing.  Such is the measure of real intelligence in a writer.  It is not that you have been manipulated – it is rather than you have been played.  And the final moments bring the entire chorale together.  It is magnificent, without being pretentious.  It is memorable without being laboured.  It is a light-headed joy to read. 

Solar

Ian McEwan is undoubtedly a great writer. Few would argue with this assertion. He is also a great thinker and is wont to research the topic of his novels to virtually PhD level. In this one he is a physicist, in Saturday he is a neurosurgeon, in Amsterdam a musicologist and in Enduring Love, a micro-biologist. It must be exhausting! I mean, writing a novel is hard enough. Writing a novel which sometimes reads like a thesis on opaque material, is another thing altogether!

Many of the reviews say that the main character of the novel, Michael Beard – a Nobel Prize winner in Physics – is dislikable. And of course, that he is. He has lived for years in the glow of one solitary achievement. Indeed, his entire career has been based on that one event. He is uncaring. He is selfish. He is entirely unfaithful. He steals ideas. He eats too much and he drinks too much. He uses his intellect to put people down and intimidate them. He is, truly, a dislikable character.

But at the same time, he is pretty much the victim of his own circumstance. The death of his student, whom he discovers cheating with his fifth wife, is not his fault. He sees it as an opportunity, however, to settle scores and does so with precision and clinical care. He simply makes the best of a bad situation, instead of doing the honest thing and suffering the consequences.

As in all McEwan’s novels, there is a singular event, which sets in motion the course of the rest of the story. This is the event, and there are, of course, consequences. And the consequences play themselves out. But in this one, I could not but help remembering an event in my childhood. The consequences were not the same, but the feeling of powerlessness was.
I cannot remember how old I was, but probably a teenager, living with a brother who was 10 years older than me. He was tidy. I was not. He would empty his rubbish into my room. I would just accept it.

One day, however, I came home to find my mother looking very serious. She held up part of a book (a book which had obviously fallen into pieces) and asked me if I knew what it was. I said it was part of a book. Which book? She wanted to know. I said I had no idea. But this she would not believe. It was a “dirty” book, she said, and of course I knew what it was because it was found in my room. It didn’t matter how much I denied it. I was guilty. And the guilty party – to save his own skin – stood by silently, accepting nothing. I was powerless. The evidence was clear.

Now, Professor Michael Beard, the Nobel laureate of the book, was equally not guilty. But he then makes himself guilty, of other crimes. Of covering up. Of being a coward, a liar, a cheat. These are things he has control over. These are things he could have done differently, and morally and without damage and hurt to others. But he chooses not to. And the position of privilege he has always enjoyed, allows him to make those negative choices.

So, he forges ahead on his stolen idea, buoyed by his previous easy history, with no fears for his future. And of course, this is the point. His work is now in climate change. It is about creating new ways of creating and harnessing and deploying energy. He is, in himself, the very image of the human species – arrogant, bloated, self-satisfied, armed with a little knowledge. Instead of choosing the ethical route, it creates ways of justifying its present destructive position.

And my view is that you cannot read this book and not see yourself in there somewhere. Somewhere in his “dislikeable” and unpleasant character lies the you and the me. And that is what makes the book so extraordinarily readable – despite is sometimes fairly dense scientific passages.

McEwan has that most admirable quality in a writer – the ability to observe and document human nature, in all its bewildering perplexity and contradiction. And so, yes, it is true, Professor Michael Beard is a horrible person. But if you cannot see yourself in some measure, in that really unpleasant character, you are, I would suggest, deluded.

Solar by Ian McEwan is published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2010