04 Jun 2013 03:45:32
From this you might imagine a spy novel, but Serena's mission for MI5, as it turns out, is to recruit some pliant, rightish writers to counter to the perceived leftish journalism and commentary of the 70s. There is a strong sense that Britain is heading for international irrelevance and economic disaster. With a nod towards Encounter magazine's CIA funding, in McEwan's tale, money is available to fund the sort of writers, including novelists, who will provide a more traditional account of British society.
Serena Frome is an unlikely candidate for a job at MI5. She is recruited almost as a legacy of her middle-aged lover, a Cambridge don, just before he ditches her and heads for an island in the Baltic. The words "Cambridge" and "don" in proximity in a spy novel very quickly raised suspicions in this reader's mind. Why would he have recruited her, a young woman with a third in maths, to go scouting for writers? Anyway, she gets the job at MI5, a place apparently peopled by caricatured chauvinists from posh schools, who treat the women as menials even though most of them have first-class degrees.
Serena is very pretty – she tells us this as she recounts her progress from bishop's daughter to Cambridge and on to Curzon Street as an MI5 operative. She is pointed towards a young novelist, Tom Haley, teaching at Sussex University (McEwan's alma mater). Haley is in the early stages of a literary career, and his work contains a number of sly references to McEwan's early books. Serena, recently rejected by her lover and controller, is very ready to fall in love with the glamorous and talented Haley, which she does without delay. She is caught, however, in a dilemma: how can she tell the man she loves, and who loves her, that the grant that she has steered his way in the name of some literary foundation is really from MI5?
McEwan pulls off two extraordinary surprises near the end, one which may remind you of Briony's postscript in Atonement. The other concerns the disappearance of her lover, the Cambridge don. Tricksy, but satisfying.
