Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real. Am I making sense?’

You can’t say the heroine of Ian McEwan’s latest novel wasn’t warned. Serena Frome is a clever, pretty young woman who led a sheltered childhood as the daughter of an Anglican bishop: ‘We grew up inside a walled garden, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.’

Though a mathematician at university, Serena is a voracious reader of novels, which leads her to Solzenitsyn, which leads her to a vociferous and unfashionable anti-communism, which leads her to a tap on the shoulder from a recruiting don, who leads her to bed, and thence to a very lowly role in the bureaucratic end of the British secret service in 1972.

Her first proper operation is codenamed ‘Sweet Tooth’. The British security services want to give the cultural cold war a nudge in the right direction by covertly channelling money, under the auspices of writers’ grants, to a handful of authors whose sympathies are understood to be anti-communist. Serena is tasked with recruiting the only novelist: Tom Haley, an impecunious lecturer at the University of Sussex. Posing as a representative of the ‘Freedom International Foundation’, she is to persuade him to accept a generous two-year stipend that will give him the chance to complete his novel. She achieves that — and also becomes his lover. There never quite seems to be a right moment to come clean about her cover story.

Sweet Tooth is avowedly a story about stories.