![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Under the pretense of working for an arts nonprofit, Frome is assigned to approach and manage a young writer named Tom Haley, who works as an English instructor at the University of Sussex and lives in Brighton. (The fact that the real-life CIA actually undertook similar projects as part of its " cultural Cold War" only heightens the absurdity.) The project's code name is "Sweet Tooth." But our protagonist has a voracious, if haphazard, taste for literature that leads the men in charge to assign her to an unlikely and somewhat comical project: discreetly funding writers who support liberal democracy - so discreetly that the writers themselves never even know they're being underwritten by the government. Serena Frome, a young, almost accidental recruit to MI5, spends most of her days in the office dealing with stultifying paperwork of the kind deemed appropriate for women in the service by their male superiors. Ian McEwan begins Sweet Tooth with an ominous epigraph taken from historian Timothy Garton Ash's book The File, an examination of the dossier on the then-young scholar kept by the East German secret police: "If only I had met, on this search, a single clearly evil person." It is surprising to plunge subsequently into a strange kind of spy thriller centered not on covert intrigues against the Soviets, but rather on the world of British literary fiction in the 1970s. ![]()
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