Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan

I wanted to love this book because Atonement really wrecked me a decade ago and I thought McEwan would be able to duplicate the emotional gravitas. But he wasn't.

Honestly the entire story of Sweet Tooth felt stilted and awkward. The narrator, Serena, felt like am imposter in her own skin. The, I suppose, brilliance, of this is revealed in the novel's late pages. But honestly, I would rather have read a well written story, than a clever narrative trick to why the entire novel felt like an out of body experience for the narrator. Think, The Sixth Sense, but the twist is boring.

And really, the novel should not have been so slow. Serena Frome is a decent maths student in high school but when she gets to Cambridge she is wildly out of her league. She scrapes by with a third and is recruited into MI-5 based on the strength of a recommendation from a professor who is also her lover. She starts work as a secretary but is then recruited onto a project recruiting writers who will secretly work for MI-5. The secret is they have no idea, and MI-5 is hoping they will write anti-communist works. But it's really up in the air as to whether this will happen.

Serena ricochets between a couple more affairs before she botches something up by not being very careful. It seems an inevitable end for a not very skilled MI-5 employee with some warped sense of her own abilities. A bit of a disappointment.

2/5 Stars